This Economist article implies expensive specialty visas will just be a boon to the Indian computer industry. It does not much mention China but easily might. What other unintended consequences might such a policy have?
Quotes:
… Hitherto the cost of securing one has been about $2,500 in legal and filing fees.
Big tech firms dominate the visas (see chart 1). Amazon alone received more than 14,000 approvals in 2025 (renewals do not count against the 85,000 quota). Indian it-services giants such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (tcs), also routinely rank among the top sponsors. And Indian citizens scoop most of the visas—about three-quarters of them in 2023. Apart from China (12%), no other country secures more than 2%.
Intended consequences: that $100,000 fee can be waived if the secretary of homeland security allows it. That secretary is an appointee of the current president.
Does this open the door to the president granting favor for certain favors offered to him. God knows and is keeping tabs.
I can’t find a cite, but I do recall seeing claims that there was an effort on right wing online communities to deliberate book flights to the US so it would be impossible for visa holders to get back into the US fast enough to beat the deadline.
That seems unlikely. You can’t “book” a flight and hold a seat without paying for it. And most fares have cancellation penalties. Not a lot of people are going to pay the airfare to / from e.g. india just to maybe screw some anonymous somebody someplace.
I could sure see a rich influencer buying one fully refundable full fare ticket to try to influence his poorer followers into doing something stupid. But I bet very few would follow through.
IOW, this smells like manufactured leftist outrage at an imaginary rightist outrage.
There are plenty of people on the right who’d be that vindictive. But ask them to spend $1000 to prove their vindictiveness and it turns out they’re mostly slacktivists, not activists.
I have never liked H1B visas anyway. Mexicans arent “taking our jobs” but overseas workers are taking tech jobs.
They really arent needed, it is just a way to hire workers cheaper. Plenty of Americans to fill those jobs.
But the fee isnt the way to go about it.
Here is s study about the good and bad of those Visas-
“Age is a core H-1B issue.Most H-1Bs are under 30, and since younger workers are cheaper than older ones (in both wages and health care costs), employers use the H-1B program to avoid hiring older Americans. (Note: “old” is age 35!)
Key to this LEGAL age discrimination against Americans is the four-tier structure for prevailing wage, the legal wage floors for H-1Bs, which is based on four levels of experience, in essence four levels of age.
Another major attraction for employers, especially in Silicon Valley, is the “handcuffed” status of H-1Bs. In practical terms, foreign tech workers have serious mobility issues. In particular, if the worker is being sponsored by the employer for a green card, the worker dare not switch jobs, as that would entail starting the multiyear green card process all over again. Employers value this immobility very highly, since the exit of an engineer in the midst of an urgent project is very harmful. Immigration lawyers extol this as a major “benefit” of hiring H-1Bs. Thus employers tend to give preference to the foreign workers over similarly-qualified Americans when hiring,
In addition, two congressional reports and a number of academic studies have shown that H-1Bs are often paid less than comparable Americans, i.e. those of the same age, education and so on.
Some other studies claim to show that the H-1Bs are not underpaid, but they suffer from methodological problems. In any case, one can readily see the underpayment, by noting that the H-1Bs are largely unable to move freely (see above) in the labor market–if one cannot move, one cannot find the best salary among competing employers. Thus the H-1Bs are on average paid below-market wages. Note also the material on prevailing wage below.
As mentioned in the overview of this site, even H-1B advocate and former tech CEO Vivek Wadhwa has admitted underpaying H-1Bs himself.
…
…
Abuse of foreign worker programs pervades the entire tech industry, INCLUDING the large, mainstream U.S. firms, and INCLUDING the foreign workers hired from U.S. universities. It is NOT limited to the Indian “bodyshops.” The large U.S. firms do tend to hire better-qualified workers than do the bodyshops, but BOTH the mainstream firms AND the bodyshops are hiring at a discount relative to their respective market sectors.”
But again, whatever the pros and cons are- this fee is not the right way to go about curbing excesses and problems with the system.
The intended consequence was for America to train up its own high-tech talent domestically.
The real actual consequence will be that all high-tech foreign talent will avoid America and go to rival nations instead and American industry will suffer.
That utterly is not any consequence the current criminal administration cares about or says it cares about or thinks it cares about.
This is entirely about fucking with the brown people and providing a way to exert illegal arbitrary leverage over certain corporations that the criminal administration chooses to take exception to.
Venice, during the Renaissance period, for example, bought all of the salt. In some places, making salt was cheap and easy. In other places, making salt was real hard. In some places, salt was close to the customer base and in others it was far away and costly to import. None of that mattered though, because if you average all the prices together and sell it at that average rate, the market would support it. It was just as worth going to buy cheap salt from a mine in Germany as it was to buy stuff from some guy boiling bear tears in Mongolia.
Ultimately, 2% of humans are (by definition) geniuses. The US has 6.8m, India has 29m, etc.
If you’re Facebook or Amazon or whoever, and you’re competing against TikTok and Alibaba, then it’s really a question of how many brains you can rally against their set of brains, when it comes to the question of dominating the software market. If I’ve got 100 geniuses to your 50, then I win. If you’ve got the 100 and I’ve only got 50, then I lose.
The price of the workers really isn’t so important. They pay for themselves by inventing new products and new ways of doing things more cheaply. You don’t go poor by pulling in Thomas Edison and telling him to make things that make money. You go poor by telling Edison that you don’t want him because you don’t accept guys with beards.
Businesses have to grow. The limits to growth are capital and actual hard limits on things like natural resources, talent, etc. Given access to more resources and talent, they’ll expand to take it. So long as a profit can still be had, they’ll gladly hire anyone, anywhere, at any price.
With any other way of operating, businesses would look at countries like the US with 20% corporate tax and think, “No, no! I shouldn’t sell there. I’ll only sell to Zimbabwe! Zero taxes! We’ll be rich!” And then, of course, they’d be poor because that’s not the only consideration. Businesses do the math to determine if they’d make money. A single number doesn’t decide that. It’s the sum of lots of different factors.
Away from the private sector, this would be (I say “would” since I expect court challenges) another leg kicked out from under US science.
The H-1B visa is pretty common for researchers working in the US after graduate school, across many career stages. A $100k start-up cost would lock out a lot of very talented people from conducting their work within US institutions, including those who were trained as students in the US using US resources.
I hope the idiot Silicon Valley execs who gave money to Trump are happy. Especially the ones who started their careers with visas.
When I worked in Silicon Valley and at Bell Labs, I hired tons of new people from colleges (mostly grad schools) with visas. It was always a pain, and relatively expensive, though not like now. Anyone who has looked through a stack of resumes (real or virtual) knows that native born Americans are rare. Not surprising given that top graduate programs get people worldwide, and lots of Americans would rather become lawyers or work in finance than in tech.
If they really cared about unfair hiring, they’d just enforce the requirement that you must search for non-visa holders for jobs. But it hardly matters for grunt programmers, since they are all going to be replaced by AI anyhow.
It is really stupid to train the world’s best and then send them back to their home countries. But we are talking Trump here, so hardly surprising.
Affirmative Action has actually done quite a bit of lifting to ensure that native-born people (e.g. whites) are getting more placement than you’d expect relative to application numbers.
Did you read my cite or at least the quotes from it?
The article said it was important.
Look, I am not saying what trump did was Good. Let me give an example-
You have a clock. It is a good clock, doing something important. But then it starts running 5 minutes slow every day. Obviously it is no longer so useful. So you have two options-
have an expert make delicate adjustments
OR
Smash it with a hammer
The hammer option is what trump did.
But what the system needed was adjustments to fix the abuses.
No big shortage and yes, cheaper. Take a look at my cite above. Or this one-
A majority of H-1B employers—including major U.S. tech firms—use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages///H-1B is a flawed visa program:DOL lets H-1B employers undercut local wages. Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. While H-1B program rules allow this, DOL has the authority to change it—but hasn’t.A small number of employers dominate the program. While over 53,000 employers used the H-1B program in 2019, the top 30 H-1B employers accounted for more than one in four of all 389,000 H-1B petitions approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019….Major U.S. firms use the H-1B program to pay low wages. Among the top 30 H-1B employers are major U.S. firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Apple, and Facebook. All of them take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill.
Before this September Order by trump, you could find many articles about the pros, cons, and abuses of the H1B system, Now most articles are about how wonderful and nessesary the system was.
One crank on the Internet is not a cite (professor in CS as may be). This is an economics and business question. That guy can tell you the big-O of TimSort. As regards economics, he’s just an asshole with an opinion (same as you and me).
If you want, I can go find some guy who agrees with me and link to his blog?
If this is an economics and business question I will link to Paul Krugman, who knows a thing or two about economy, despises trump and has a Nobel prize*:
Spoiler: He thinks it is a very bad idea and that it leads to corruption.
*Oh that makes trump so jealous, even if it is not a Peace Nobel prize.
