Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

"The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can."

Creating low cost alternatives and taking advance of lax laws is part of that. If you can import 100k skilled workers per year under a scheme that gives you more power over them. Then you also offshore 300k jobs per year to countries with weaker protections.

It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

Labor share of US GDP is usually around 60%, which is comparable to Europe.

If you divide the GDP by the number of employed people (including self-employed and entrepreneurs), you get a bit over $180k/person. The median full-time income is a bit over $60k. In other words, as a gross simplification, the mean worker earns 80% more than the median worker.

The comparable numbers for Germany are a ~€100k, ~€45k, and 35%. If something is hollowing out the American middle class, it might be the high earners rather than the capital.

The largest contributor to the shrinking middle class has been more and more people are moving into the upper class.

You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....

The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.

The hollowing out of the American middle class is because the huge, wealthy middle class was a post-war anomaly, from a time when the US had the only intact industrial plant in the world, and lack of communication technology and logistical sophistication meant production had to be localized and centralized. So, if you happened to be living in the right places in the US, you could have a house and a car and put a couple kids through college on an (artificially-inflated) factory worker's wage. At the same time, 80% of the population of the world was on the edge of starvation.

Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).

It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.

What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.

Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.

Thank you for illustrating a point that's hard to make, which is ... on this website everyone understands the math for supply and demand. Except when it comes to immigration. When it's about immigration, it's the evil capitalists. Again, thanks. We should all know by now that when the supply of labor increases, there is Zero affect on wages.

>The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor

Importing cheap foreign labor to undercut unions and lower wages is one of the spokes of the wheel used by capital to reduce the power of labor (and always has been).

this is why people cant afford anything

Zuckerberg's compound didn't make the Bay Area housing crisis and Barron Trump isn't why NYU is expensive or hard to get into. Giving everyone involved $1 million from Larry Ellison's pocket wouldn't particularly change either.

That's not to say you shouldn't do it! But the problem is elsewhere.

The H-1B requires that the position requires a specialization.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...

    The occupation requires:

    Theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge; and
    Attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in a directly related* specific specialty (or its equivalent) as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.
    
    The position must also meet one of the following criteria to qualify as a specialty occupation:

    A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally the minimum entry requirement for the particular occupation;
    A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally required to perform job duties in parallel positions among similar organizations in the employer’s industry in the United States;
    The employer, or third party if the beneficiary will be staffed to that third party, normally requires a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, to perform the job duties of the position; or
    The specific duties of the offered position are so specialized, complex, or unique that the knowledge required to perform them is normally associated with the attainment of a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent.*

Chances are this was done as a seasonal H-2B non-agricultural worker (likely under a seasonal need)

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

    To qualify for H-2B nonimmigrant classification, the petitioner must establish that:
    There are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work.
    Employing H-2B workers will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.

From the reuters table it seems that the biggest H1B beneficiaries are FAANG.

Do you suggest that they check the immigration status and offer to some people lower compensation because of their status?

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You seem to be suggesting that the H1B pulls wages up because the median pay is higher than the median overall pay in the country? That’s not a valid comparison, you’d have to compare the H1B’s salary to the median pay in their specialty.

It definitely suppresses TECH worker pay and decreases mobility. For the H1B they become indentured servants often working 60+ hrs a week.

H1B holders are paid less for the same job, keeping wages down.

Your second paragraph doesn't follow the first. 90-118K might feel like a lot to you, or to many, but it doesn't mean that those wages aren't dragged DOWN. If you live in SF, NYC, Seattle or other HCOL areas, 90-118K is definitely not HIGH. And software jobs pay WAY more than that. H1's definitely are paid BELOW the prevailing wage for the same job, in the same area. So compare apples to apples.

That tells us nothing without knowing the median pay of the jobs they're replacing.

You aren’t accounting for hours worked. Your H1B are probably putting in 30-50% more hours and with put up with any bullshit you dish out.

What's the median pay of big tech workers? I started at 150k 8 years ago as a new grad, for comparison.

Guest workers have no long term stake in living in the US unless they win a green card. Six years and they're out. Given this state of affairs, they will be compliant and not demand increasing compensation when they don't have to plan for a future in the US. Get too uppity and you get the boot. The suppression is hidden within this dynamic and sinks the prevailing wage for all workers.

Citations of broad H-1B visa abuse:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305623

The U.S. is where the money is. In canada between public and private sector about 30 billion dollars are spent on research and development. Across the entire EU, this figure is more like 440 billion dollars. In the U.S., the figure is 885 billion dollars.

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/publicrandd-aspx/

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246

If you're a US investor, investing in US R&D is easy, you have a good idea of how things work and how to get justice if you're defrauded.

If you want to invest in another country, that's a big change. There's certainly opportunity there, but without knowledge and contacts, it can be very hard to get things done.

One track to investing in foreign R&D is foreign nationals come and work in the US to earn skills, knowledge, and capital, and then they take those earnings and invest them in their country of origin, maybe living here or there.

Gifted architects and builders are presumably born every year in Silicon Valley, but we are far too rich, developed, and democratic to want new buildings.

Other countries are free not to want the things that Silicon Valley talents generate. More for us!

A few ways:

1. An American company benefited from their labor

2. American consumers benefited from the goods / services they contributed to providing

3. American citizens benefited from the services provided by the taxes they pay

4. Other American businesses benefited from their patronage

American companies are overwhelmingly owned and operated by Americans who can extract value from the H1B employees well in excess of their salaries (even with the new cap and fees)

The more smart people we have working on the world's hardest problems, the more likely it is that we'll have breakthroughs that make the world better

They generated economic activity while they were in the US, no? That seems to be a net positive. You'd otherwise have to be able to argue that, if you replaced them with a US citizen during the time they were here, the greater economic activity would have been generated.

Why thank you! That's kind of you to write.

I'm from the US, but lived in Europe for quite a while, and my kids have dual citizenship. I think that people moving to places where they are better off is a good thing.

I'm writing this reply not to the lazy commenter, but to anyone reading this thread...

Yet again, we have classic HN speculation masquerading as authority.

Should software developer salaries be comparable to accountants or to surgeons? That's an arbitrary value judgment.

Software engineers have less purchasing power than they would without the H-1B visa program, and that's indisputable. 64% of the visas go to IT workers and 52% go specifically to programmers, which implies beyond all shadow of a doubt that their salaries decrease further than the cost of the goods and services they pay for.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir!

This also impacts non-software tech: see recent layoffs statistics at Intel, what percentage are H1B and why aren't companies required to re-prove H1B necessity? Can we just over-hire and claim we need H1Bs because we can't find enough talent to fill the rolls, then submit that we over-hired and lay off all the US talent? This seems to be a bit of what happens even if not intentionally.

I'm writing this reply not to the lazy commenter, but to anyone reading this thread...

You're just passing off your own speculation as authoritative, and you didn't even read my comment to comprehension.

I didn't say we need less immigration in the tech sector. I said it hurts tech workers when there's a deflationary effect on their earnings but not the goods and services they pay for, and hence the same immigration practices should apply to every industry.

On paper, you would think this is the case, but in practice 64% of H1-B workers are in IT and 52% are programmers:

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

Again, it stands to reason that if the deflationary effect on tech workers' salaries is disproportionate to the deflationary effect on all the other goods and services they pay for, then tech workers are worse off from the H1-B program. I've seen claims less ironclad than this accepted as fact in peer-reviewed life sciences-related research.

Your comment is just another classic HN case of speculation masquerading as authority.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Yes, if you're truly exceptional, you can get in the US. You can also get into any other country in the world. And the Trump administration doesn't seem to be interested in changing that.

But only a tiny sliver of what you would consider successful, skilled people can qualify for O-1. To my original point: if you're "merely" hard-working and good at something, you - as a general rule - have no lawful pathway to immigrate to the US.

Here's another way to look at it: let's say that in any country, roughly 10% of people fall into the category of "talented and hard-working" - not superstars, but the kind of people who would conceptually enrich the economy. Worldwide, that's probably what, 400 million adults? Further, let's say that about 10% would be interested in living in the US. And before all the EU folks sneer at that: that's probably a big underestimate, because a good chunk of the world is living in places with a much lower standard of living. So that's 40 million who probably want to come. And the total number of employment visas is ~100k/year. We aim for the global top <0.1%.

All you're doing is having a gold card program but where the immigrant pays the applying company rather than the government. Seems pointless.

As you'll see from my other comments about H1-B visas, I agree. However, it doesn't change the fact that the person's suggestion would just be another way to kill the program, not a way to fix it.

Really? Most if not all EU work permits, especially highly-qualified ones are tied to an employer for at least the first 2+ years. If you get fired you have up to 3 months to find another employer who is willing to take over your residence permit.

Part of the proposal is that the employer pays the government a large fee to sponsor the visa. They're not doing that for local workers; it's an entirely incomparable situation.

I totally support bringing in actual specialists, or fantastically talented people from abroad… but it’s painfully obvious how infrequently that happens. I worked with an H1B doing L2 support in the mid aughts. The position required significant knowledge of networking, but nothing close to even a mid-career enterprise network administrator, and it wasn’t a rare skillset for the area. We had plenty of very local candidates when we hired people before, but suddenly, new management decided it was an incredibly specialized, difficult-to-fill, rare job that paid locals an eye-watering 70k/year to start but paid an H1Bs far less than that I assume.

Then it's not H1B visa anymore - internal employee transfers use different mechanisms.

That's what they're doing, it's going to be $100k per year to sponsor, up to 6 years.

You're taking a all or nothing stance. There must be a middle-ground where employers don't risk getting "scammed".

Signing bonuses almost universally have a 1-year clawback (or are otherwise only doled out periodically and not all up front), so not a good analogy here.

1400 x $100,000 is $140 million, not $1.4 billion

Subsequent year, probably. In later years, no. Massachusetts is case study on this.

Don't be so sure of that. Network effects are still subject to tipping points.

>US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures

Yes, and there are plenty of US citizens to fill these roles.

> These are crazy outliers

They are. And in the truly talented spaces there are many at all of the ranges in between.

> US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures

$100k for three to six years seems entirely reasonable if it's really such a critical need.

I'm happy you're here but the H1B program needs to slow down in America for a while.

The odds are now per candidate, not per application. If they submit multiple applications, it does not up chances for that candidate in any way.

And yes, it does work, because we have data from the year before this change, to the year after to compare against. The "Eligible Registrations for Beneficiaries with Multiple Eligible Registrations" dropped from 47,314 for FY 2025 to 7,828 for FY 2026. Source: https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-announces-strengthened-i...

Wasn't the application linked to the candidate's passport number?

A common problem in latam and other geos is brain drain. Most of their best minds simply leave the country looking for better opportunities. That is impactful for the countries economies, the country invest a lot in people,but others see the benefits.

During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.

Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!

>There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US.

As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-

Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.

Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US

US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

/me

I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.

Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries

Hi!

I know I'm just a datum, but I gotta represent myself.

Not yet.

The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.

Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.

Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.

For FAANG engineers this will likely mean moving to Vancouver, Zurich or Singapore with their job, salary, rsus and taxes.

Because of our historical strength. If we drive people away, that just makes room for other contenders. How is that smart?

How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

Mmmh...How about four countries?US,UK,Canada &South Africa.

As a student,though

I am an American-born worker at a giant tech corporation. My coworkers are all immigrants, my job was created by immigrants, if they left I'd be unemployed because there's no way I can build this whole thing by myself. The work would simply disappear without them.

and so who owns the shares of "corporate america"? Newflash: Teachers' and firefighters' and cops' pensions are all invested in "corporate america". As well as pensions of union workers. As well as 401ks of all the other middle class people. Come on.

"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.

Good. I’m sure you and the 10 other individuals who choose to boycott all of FAANG will ensure that this all balances out in the end.

very real risk ? it's a certainty not a risk.

Right now. What happened in the future? When the job market recovers will it happen in the US or elsewhere?

That classification already exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer

... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)

    Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000

    Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.

Yep. There is a huge amount of American talent wallowing in low-level, dead end jobs because corporations have been actively incentivized to hire cheap, captive foreign labor rather than foster American talent. I am absolutely thrilled to witness this return to sanity.

It has nothing to do with “skin color,” but economics, culture, and worldview.

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton

Don’t play the race card, you sound emotional saying that.

You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.

It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.

you know what's really stupid? when we give someone a student visa and then don't have a easy to keep them in the country on a work visa

There are studies regarding that: almost half of S&P 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children https://www.brookings.edu/articles/almost-half-of-fortune-50...

These other visas are incredibly complicated to get. And funneling everyone through student visas is just inflating demand for uni degrees.

What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.

On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.

Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.

Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.

Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.

Let's turn this around - would the US win if young, skilled people were net-leaving it?

Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.

Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.

---

Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?

Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.

(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)

Have you never met an H-1B worker?

Yeah exactly. And they embrace that fraud and turn it into a cornerstone of their economy. I too have worked with extremely talented people from the subcontinent and not one was on an H1B. The H1Bs I worked with were less competent than an undergraduate intern. Thankfully I only had to do that once during an on-prem install in Tyson’s Corner.

Yep.

Why are you using quotes around steal as though I used that word somewhere? Read what I wrote, repeat it to yourself when you fall asleep, come back tomorrow.

So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.

Yes I would prefer just faster road to skilled immigration. It also doesn’t help string people along with this distant hope of permanent residency

I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.

Economy isn't a zero-sum game. Foreign talents were the enabler of the growth in this field.

Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.

How is that possible ? Doesn't h1b have to pay within a set range of wages?

Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments

There's also a bunch of organizations that are desperate and can't pay. E.g. a lot of rural and VA hospitals are staffed by H1B physicians. A rural hospital in the middle of Idaho won't attract a cardiologist through salary (i.e. the 500k/yr they can make in cities) and probably won't be able to afford a 100k application fee to get one. Also for lots of researchers and post-docs, 100k is more than their annual salary.

This fee is a great way to ensure that there's very little medical services available to rural populations and to help kill science in the US among other things.

It might be that in that industry, paying someone the $200k might mean the position doesn't make sense compared to the value delivered, and that you should instead open up another offshore office

> To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically.

I like the goal of making sure visa works are paid well for where they live.

I would not want to restrict the visa worker geographically though. Or alternatively I am unsure about the overhead of tracking the location visa holders and enforcing salary changes.

Might also have unintended knock on effect of encouraging job growth in low cost of living areas.

This is why I say about the median salary across a branch of industry. A company is free to bring in anyone they want, but not free to pay them entry-level salary then. They should rather pay entry-level salary to local folks, e.g. recent graduates. The point is to bring above-average workers from abroad, as you say.

I don't think it's easy to game the median number, or the third quartile number if you prefer. Unless the salary distribution is severely bimodal, it should work reasonably.

This makes sense if H1-Bs are about lack of talent instead of cheap labor.

As my manager at Amazon once told me, “Amazon prefers H1Bs because they take more abuse.”

It also prevents wages from rising, can't find anymore local talent at 80K/year so you hire H1B at that wage. If that didn't happen, wages would rise until they found someone local. I think something like equal pay and then a 10-20% fee that is funneled into american education/up-skilling efforts.

Didn’t IBM try this with Dubuque?

Because there aren't enough "equally qualified nurses".

> There is a lot of under-employment for highly qualified US citizens.

No, there isn't. Even with the current AI mess, the unemployment for highly-qualified software engineers is 2.8%: https://www.ciodive.com/news/june-jobs-report-comptia-data-I...

The AI is now decimating the jobs for the recent CS graduates.

We know that the US is not the only country with shortage in healthcare workers. Most countries with an ageing population face this.

We know that's not going to happen.

What now?

Nurses would be TN or in the past H-1C.

That's why you've got to pass the background check. It doesn't seem any more prone to abuse than the existing H1B program.

Isn't that Trump golden card ?. Pay $5mil and boom, welcome to the US, rich drug dealer.

"If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person."

You're believing and repeating the propaganda. The H1B was sold to Americans as for this purpose and then very deliberately turned into a loophole for importing massive amounts of foreign labor.

How silly is it to accept the idea that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla are not be able to hire Americans for any role they want. They're the richest companies on the planet!

These companies use the H1B to increase their labor supply, suppress wages, and gain indentured workers.

If they couldn't cheat by importing cheaper foreign labor they would have to compete against each other much more than they do for American workers.

This is all about big companies rigging the system. They do not care if it's good or bad for America, the foreign workers, or anyone else. It's simple greed.

Multiple registrations are being filed for the same person in order to game the system. This is discussed in some details in a USCIS report [1]. The increased application fee is presumably to stem that practice.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

The fee should help ensure that only higher paying jobs or truly hard to find roles would be worth paying for as well (not that this is the right option, but playing it out). You would gladly pay 100k if the role already is high paying, it will be a small fraction of the cost, you won’t do that if it’s a couple year salary. It will also help curb abuse through multiple applications. I agree hard to find jobs for highly talented people (who are paid well) should be brought in.

>If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person

It was never, ever that they "can't find someone".

The opposite, there's a US corporate tax loophole for having operations overseas.

https://thefactcoalition.org/tariffs-manufacturing-tax-break...

it is very difficult to determine this. Companies that do h1Bs are all multinational, so they can locate dev offshore and just say they did it internally. There's also the reality that even if you go out and try to evaluate the revenue that comes from IT, you basically can't get clean attribution even if you want to. many H1Bs are not working on customer facing product, but internal projects and that makes treating things like application maintenance or service desk pretty difficult to calculate for ultimate revenue outcome.