The End of Legal Immigration?

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that would charge companies $100,000 for each new H1B visa application. The H1B is the main visa used for hiring skilled foreign workers in the United States. The announcement triggered a wave of panic among foreign workers, confusion amongst employers, and a flurry of clarifications from the White House. Images were shared online of panics at airports as passengers tried to disembark airplanes that were ready to take off, fearing that if they left the country, they might not be allowed to return.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik added to the confusion. Standing next to Trump at the signing, he told reporters that it was an annual charge, saying that companies would need to decide whether a foreign worker was valuable enough to justify paying $100,000 a year to the government in addition to the worker's salary. Over the next 24 hours, the White House scrambled to correct the record. Caroline Lev issued a three-point clarification stating that the fee was not annual.

It's a one-time payment, that it applies only to new applications, not renewals, and that current visa holders would not be charged to re-enter the country. This announcement from President Trump comes with a certain irony. During his campaign in 2020, he praised the H1B program, calling it a great thing and something I've always supported. Less than a year ago, he told a podcast while he was campaigning that if you graduate from a college, you should get a green card with your diploma.

Now, he's proposing a fee which would effectively end the H-1B visa category by making it prohibitive for most businesses to hire foreign workers in the United States. While a lot of the news has been about the tech industry, the visas are widely used by the US health care sector to recruit international medical graduates or foreign trained doctors and other professionals trained abroad. Universities additionally rely on them to hire professors, researchers, and postocs. Estimates circulated online that the Visa fee could raise $14 billion a year in revenue, but these projections assumed the demand would remain unchanged and that the fee would apply to annual renewals, neither of which is true.

The actual revenue is likely to be significantly lower as the new rule incentivizes companies to hire highly skilled workers at foreignbased offices instead of bringing them into the United States. ...