$100,000 for a visa

Sean Rameswaram: The president loves to say things. Let's just look at the last week or so. There was a time his teleprompter broke, but he still managed to charm the whole world. I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell. And then you've surely heard that it can only good happen. Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen. And that same day he tried to pronounce a big word. Well, let's see how we say that. Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen. Is that okay? Sure, bud. Unclear what impact a lot of these statements and mispronunciations will have, but recently there was one that could have major implications soon. $100,000 for an H-1B visa. The country would rather not have to pay $100,000. But they'd rather, how do you do that? You hire Americans. That's not how it works. But how does it work? We're going to try and find out on Today Explained.

[Support for the show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Clawed.]

Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained. Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.

Michelle Hackman: That's why we reached out to her to talk about H-1B visas. The H-1B visa is I would say the primary visa that people use to come work in this country as foreign professionals. So most often at tech companies, in finance, in consulting, foreign doctors. It's the primary visa foreign doctors use and foreign scientists. A lot of them are on H-1B visas. It's also the primary vehicle that foreign students who come and study here are able to stay in the country after they graduate and their student visas expire. It's a three-year visa. you can renew it for another three years, and then you eventually can apply for a green card off of it. There are 85,000 of them handed out each year. There are a few extras that go to people, you know, universities and a few other nonprofit organizations are exempt from that 85,000 cap. But the 85,000 cap applies to all the companies in America. And there are way more applicants for the visa every year than there are actually slots. And so every year they run a lottery to decide who gets the visa.

Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I guess relatively small is sort of how you look at it. But I think the issue here, Michelle, is that these are visas that go to some of the most high-profile companies in America that conservatives believe that should be hiring Americans instead of foreigners. I mean, we're talking about Amazon and Microsoft and Google. Actually, Tesla is one of the biggest users of the H-1B visa program. And there are some legit complaints about it, too. A lot of these visas actually go to companies. There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas. And their model is that they do IT, you know, a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies in-house IT offices. And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.

Michelle Hackman: That, I would say, is the big, big reason that a lot of people have issues with the H-1B visa program. It's not so much Microsoft and Amazon. It is these companies. And you said you were surprised by the $100,000 fee the Trump administration just slapped on these visas. Is this the first time the Trump administration, part two or part one, has tried to reform H-1B visas?

Sean Rameswaram: No, not at all. I mean, the Trump administration or a lot of people in it, H-1B has sort of been like a boogeyman for them for years. And so in the first Trump administration, we saw a lot of efforts to sort of reform, change, downsize the H-1B visa program. And I would say some Democrats are in support of some of these changes, too. Much work has to be done to truly fix the full scope of the H-1B program and more broadly, to make sure that Americans have the access to the training necessary to fill these jobs. The idea that in the United States of America today, we need more people to come from other countries who will work at high-tech jobs because we just don't have the workers in America is absolute nonsense.

Michelle Hackman: I think a lot of people think the way that the system works right now, just sort of doing a random lottery to decide who gets to stay in the country on an H-1B visa makes no sense. And so the first Trump administration tried to put out a regulation that basically gave preference to people who had job offers with higher salaries. They should be given to the most skilled and highest paid applicants, and they should never, ever be used to replace Americans. That was supposed to sort of undercut this argument that companies are hiring H-1Bs because they want to pay them less than Americans. There was a lawsuit over that. It didn't end up going through. But I always thought that they were going to sort of try something like that again. Instead, they went for something much sort of bigger.

Sean Rameswaram: And do we know how or why Trump landed on this application fee? Was it just like a nice big round number like million style?

Michelle Hackman: Actually Sean I think you're on to something. From what I've been able to gather, I think that this actually started around a separate visa that Trump is calling the gold card. The gold card. We will allow the most successful job creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It's like the green card, but better and more sophisticated. Sophisticated. He's gotten quite a bit of blowback for that idea, especially actually from his sort of hardline, you know, anti-immigrant groups on the right that are typically his allies.

Sean Rameswaram: Ouch. And those people feel like, oh my gosh, that's just like a pay-for-play scheme. Why would we just sell U.S. citizenship? And so it seems that the idea has sprung up that let's also do this to the H-1B visa program. Let's attach a huge fee to that, too, so that we're only getting the best, the wealthiest, the smartest, you know, the people who companies are really, really only willing to pay for so that we can sort of downsize the overall immigration program and only get the best, the richest, the smartest.

Michelle Hackman: And the initial reaction to this from big tech firms, from smaller tech firms, from startups, from just about everyone over the weekend seemed to be confusion. Yes. Has the White House cleared up the confusion around this price hike for an H-1B visa? Definitely not. Okay. This was one of the messiest rollouts I have seen. And that's saying something because it's the Trump administration who changes policy on the fly all the time.

Sean Rameswaram: On Friday, we had Howard Letnick, who's the Commerce Secretary. And I'll say, the Commerce Department doesn't set immigration policy. So it was a little bizarre that he was the person doing this rollout. He came, stood next to President Trump in the Oval Office, said... Is that person valuable enough to have a $100,000 a year payment to the government? It's annual. It can be a total of six years. He emphasized it a few times. He emphasized it in a call with reporters later. He even said, we haven't decided yet. It might be a $300,000 fee at the beginning of the three-year period. We're still talking about that. He made it sound like this was going to apply to current H-1B visa holders and to renewals of H-1B visas. And when the White House sort of policy actually came out, this thing called a proclamation, when people read it, it pretty plainly made it sound like anyone who was currently outside of the United States, like a current H-1B visa holder who might be visiting family overseas, wouldn't be let back into the country unless they paid $100,000.

Michelle Hackman: Now, on Saturday, the White House sort of scrambled to clean this up. They put out statements. They put out videos. They had different surrogates reach out to reporters and basically correct the record and say anyone who was telling us otherwise was actually lying. But it's gotten even more confusing. So, you know, I think companies came out of the weekend thinking that the White House guidance was this is only going to apply to people who are applying for H-1B visas in the future coming up, let's say, in this spring cycle for the next round of H-1B visas. But literally on Tuesday, we reached out to the Commerce Department and they told us it actually still hasn't been decided, that they actually still are looking at making this an annual fee instead of a one-time fee.

Sean Rameswaram: So, I think a lot remains to be seen. Okay, so people still don't know how this works. Is it even happening? Or is it sort of TBD? Could they just wipe this idea off the face of the planet tomorrow? I think anything's possible. Probably the likelier route is that I would imagine someone is going to sue over this policy, and then we see if the courts let it go forward.

Michelle Hackman: Huh. Why sue? Is there something untoward going on here? I think that people believe that sort of this is a real overreach in presidential authority. You know, Congress really is supposed to decide how visas work, not the administration. Congress has given the government or the executive branch the ability to raise fees, but just in order to cover the cost of processing visas. You know, you're not supposed to just slap a ridiculously huge deterrent fee onto a visa category to make sure that more, you know, a lot of people don't apply for it.

Sean Rameswaram: The other thing is that President Trump, in order to do this, is basically using the exact same authority that he used for his travel ban against Muslim majority countries. And so, you know, a question is, is he allowed to do that? He basically is really testing the limits of his authority to use his travel ban authority to just basically ban whatever types of immigrants he doesn't want.

Michelle Hackman: The interesting thing, Sean, is that now that it's come out, I sort of expected there to be uniform opposition from tech. But we've seen a little bit more of a mixed and muted reaction from them. Earlier this week, we actually saw the CEO of NVIDIA go on TV and say he thought this was a good idea. I think immigration is really important to our company and it's really important to our nation's future. And I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making.

Sean Rameswaram: You know, I think some tech CEOs feel like, especially some of the most deep-pocketed ones, feel like, hey, if there's a $100,000 fee and we can afford that, And also that means that not a lot of other people are going to apply for this visa. We're going to at least get all of the visas we want. You know, right now you enter the lottery and maybe a third of the people you apply for get the visa. So I think some of these top CEOs are saying, that's actually a price I'm willing to pay if I'm guaranteed these visas.

Michelle Hackman: I think there's also a really real phenomenon of companies who are afraid of sticking their necks out and going against Trump. And so we've seen a few companies, you know, quietly communicate that they're not going to participate in a lawsuit, even though they would like to see a lawsuit happen.

Sean Rameswaram: Hackman, Michelle, Journal, WallStreet, .com, WSJ. Is there a better way to reform how the H-1B visa is handed out? Of course there is, when we're back on Today Explained.

[Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude.]

Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.

Britta Glennon: That's why we reached out to her to talk about H-1B visas. The H-1B visa is I would say the primary visa that people use to come work in this country as foreign professionals. So most often at tech companies, in finance, in consulting, foreign doctors. It's the primary visa foreign doctors use and foreign scientists. A lot of them are on H-1B visas. It's also the primary vehicle that foreign students who come and study here are able to stay in the country after they graduate and their student visas expire. It's a three-year visa. you can renew it for another three years, and then you eventually can apply for a green card off of it. There are 85,000 of them handed out each year. There are a few extras that go to people, you know, universities and a few other nonprofit organizations are exempt from that 85,000 cap. But the 85,000 cap applies to all the companies in America. And there are way more applicants for the visa every year than there are actually slots. And so every year they run a lottery to decide who gets the visa.

Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I guess relatively small is sort of how you look at it. But I think the issue here, Britta, is that these are visas that go to some of the most high-profile companies in America that conservatives believe that should be hiring Americans instead of foreigners. I mean, we're talking about Amazon and Microsoft and Google. Actually, Tesla is one of the biggest users of the H-1B visa program. And there are some legit complaints about it, too. A lot of these visas actually go to companies. There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas. And their model is that they do IT, you know, a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies in-house IT offices. And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.

Britta Glennon: That, I would say, is the big, big reason that a lot of people have issues with the H-1B visa program. It's not so much Microsoft and Amazon. It is these companies. And you said you were surprised by the $100,000 fee the Trump administration just slapped on these visas. Is this the first time the Trump administration, part two or part one, has tried to reform H-1B visas?

Sean Rameswaram: No, not at all. I mean, the Trump administration or a lot of people in it, H-1B has sort of been like a boogeyman for them for years. And so in the first Trump administration, we saw a lot of efforts to sort of reform, change, downsize the H-1B visa program. And I would say some Democrats are in support of some of these changes, too. Much work has to be done to truly fix the full scope of the H-1B program and more broadly, to make sure that Americans have the access to the training necessary to fill these jobs. The idea that in the United States of America today, we need more people to come from other countries who will work at high-tech jobs because we just don't have the workers in America is absolute nonsense.

Britta Glennon: I think a lot of people think the way that the system works right now, just sort of doing a random lottery to decide who gets to stay in the country on an H-1B visa makes no sense. And so the first Trump administration tried to put out a regulation that basically gave preference to people who had job offers with higher salaries. They should be given to the most skilled and highest paid applicants, and they should never, ever be used to replace Americans. That was supposed to sort of undercut this argument that companies are hiring H-1Bs because they want to pay them less than Americans. There was a lawsuit over that. It didn't end up going through. But I always thought that they were going to sort of try something like that again. Instead, they went for something much sort of bigger.

Sean Rameswaram: And do we know how or why Trump landed on this application fee? Was it just like a nice big round number like million style?

Britta Glennon: Actually Sean I think you're on to something. From what I've been able to gather, I think that this actually started around a separate visa that Trump is calling the gold card. The gold card. We will allow the most successful job creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It's like the green card, but better and more sophisticated. Sophisticated. He's gotten quite a bit of blowback for that idea, especially actually from his sort of hardline, you know, anti-immigrant groups on the right that are typically his allies.

Sean Rameswaram: Ouch. And those people feel like, oh my gosh, that's just like a pay-for-play scheme. Why would we just sell U.S. citizenship? And so it seems that the idea has sprung up that let's also do this to the H-1B visa program. Let's attach a huge fee to that, too, so that we're only getting the best, the wealthiest, the smartest, you know, the people who companies are really, really only willing to pay for so that we can sort of downsize the overall immigration program and only get the best, the richest, the smartest.

Britta Glennon: And the initial reaction to this from big tech firms, from smaller tech firms, from startups, from just about everyone over the weekend seemed to be confusion. Yes. Has the White House cleared up the confusion around this price hike for an H-1B visa? Definitely not. Okay. This was one of the messiest rollouts I have seen. And that's saying something because it's the Trump administration who changes policy on the fly all the time.

Sean Rameswaram: On Friday, we had Howard Letnick, who's the Commerce Secretary. And I'll say, the Commerce Department doesn't set immigration policy. So it was a little bizarre that he was the person doing this rollout. He came, stood next to President Trump in the Oval Office, said... Is that person valuable enough to have a $100,000 a year payment to the government? It's annual. It can be a total of six years. He emphasized it a few times. He emphasized it in a call with reporters later. He even said, we haven't decided yet. It might be a $300,000 fee at the beginning of the three-year period. We're still talking about that. He made it sound like this was going to apply to current H-1B visa holders and to renewals of H-1B visas. And when the White House sort of policy actually came out, this thing called a proclamation, when people read it, it pretty plainly made it sound like anyone who was currently outside of the United States, like a current H-1B visa holder who might be visiting family overseas, wouldn't be let back into the country unless they paid $100,000.

Britta Glennon: Now, on Saturday, the White House sort of scrambled to clean this up. They put out statements. They put out videos. They had different surrogates reach out to reporters and basically correct the record and say anyone who was telling us otherwise was actually lying. But it's gotten even more confusing. So, you know, I think companies came out of the weekend thinking that the White House guidance was this is only going to apply to people who are applying for H-1B visas in the future coming up, let's say, in this spring cycle for the next round of H-1B visas. But literally on Tuesday, we reached out to the Commerce Department and they told us it actually still hasn't been decided, that they actually still are looking at making this an annual fee instead of a one-time fee.

Sean Rameswaram: So, I think a lot remains to be seen. Okay, so people still don't know how this works. Is it even happening? Or is it sort of TBD? Could they just wipe this idea off the face of the planet tomorrow? I think anything's possible. Probably the likelier route is that I would imagine someone is going to sue over this policy, and then we see if the courts let it go forward.

Britta Glennon: Huh. Why sue? Is there something untoward going on here? I think that people believe that sort of this is a real overreach in presidential authority. You know, Congress really is supposed to decide how visas work, not the administration. Congress has given the government or the executive branch the ability to raise fees, but just in order to cover the cost of processing visas. You know, you're not supposed to just slap a ridiculously huge deterrent fee onto a visa category to make sure that more, you know, a lot of people don't apply for it.

Sean Rameswaram: The other thing is that President Trump, in order to do this, is basically using the exact same authority that he used for his travel ban against Muslim majority countries. And so, you know, a question is, is he allowed to do that? He basically is really testing the limits of his authority to use his travel ban authority to just basically ban whatever types of immigrants he doesn't want.

Britta Glennon: The interesting thing, Sean, is that now that it's come out, I sort of expected there to be uniform opposition from tech. But we've seen a little bit more of a mixed and muted reaction from them. Earlier this week, we actually saw the CEO of NVIDIA go on TV and say he thought this was a good idea. I think immigration is really important to our company and it's really important to our nation's future. And I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making.

Sean Rameswaram: You know, I think some tech CEOs feel like, especially some of the most deep-pocketed ones, feel like, hey, if there's a $100,000 fee and we can afford that, And also that means that not a lot of other people are going to apply for this visa. We're going to at least get all of the visas we want. You know, right now you enter the lottery and maybe a third of the people you apply for get the visa. So I think some of these top CEOs are saying, that's actually a price I'm willing to pay if I'm guaranteed these visas.

Britta Glennon: I think there's also a really real phenomenon of companies who are afraid of sticking their necks out and going against Trump. And so we've seen a few companies, you know, quietly communicate that they're not going to participate in a lawsuit, even though they would like to see a lawsuit happen.

Sean Rameswaram: Hackman, Michelle, Journal, WallStreet, .com, WSJ. Is there a better way to reform how the H-1B visa is handed out? Of course there is, when we're back on Today Explained.

Britta Glennon: Yeah, so the short answer is I don't think it's a good idea. Who do you work for? The fee before this was somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000, depending on the type of company and a variety of other things. And so as a result, I think it's going to really constrain the use of the H-1B program, which is going to hurt the U.S. economy and actually the American worker.

Sean Rameswaram: There's two general arguments that I've heard that could be driving this. One is this belief that H visas are actually not about skilled labor They about cheap workers who can undercut U labor They bringing in these workers because they want to have cheaper workers This program is not only grossly unfair to American workers, in many ways unfair to foreign workers as well. This is not really borne out in the literature, right? So, for example, I talked about how lots of big firms are offshoring or even acquiring other firms in response to H-1B restrictions, that's a lot more costly than hiring an American, right? Even at higher wages. So that kind of response doesn't seem likely if that's true.

Britta Glennon: But I think actually there's sort of a more important sort of underlying issue here, which is that it relies on this belief that there's a fixed number of jobs in the U.S. economy. We want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies and so forth. But I don't want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say, we can't find workers here in America. People think there are 100 jobs. And if an immigrant comes and they take one of those jobs, there's only 99 left for everyone else. That's not actually true, right? When an immigrant comes and takes one of those jobs, they are also consuming goods and services, right? So they're creating demand for more goods, which companies have to then provide, right? So they have to increase production, which often means hiring more people, more demand for services, right? So maybe they have kids and they need to hire childcare, right? So more demand for childcare workers. So they are increasing demand for other jobs, right? So they're likely to create jobs that way.

Sean Rameswaram: And so it's relying on this false notion that if an immigrant takes a job, there are fewer jobs for everyone else. And that's simply not true sort of theoretically or empirically.

Britta Glennon: Now, the second motivation is, I think, in my view, a bit more valid, and that is to deal with some of the abuses in the H-1B program. So, there are some companies that don't use the visa in the way that it's intended, often outsourcing companies that are flooding the H-1B lottery with applications to try to kind of ensure that they're getting some H-1B holders. And a lot of those companies are relying on sort of cheaper foreign labor, right? So, this is a legitimate concern. There are companies that are abusing the program. But, you know, that's not because we offer H-1B visas, first of all, right? That has to do with how it's allocated. There have been a lot of reforms proposed for how to change the system to try to deal with these kinds of abuses. none of those are proposing a hundred thousand dollar fee the problem with the one hundred thousand dollar fee is that is not targeted in any way and so it's going to disproportionately hurt you know those startups who can't who definitely can't pay that fee it's going to hurt entry level positions it's going to hurt universities who rely on on h1b visas it's also making the country a lot less attractive for foreign talent, right? So the top people in the world are going to be a lot less interested in coming to the U.S. if they see an environment where there's going to be far fewer companies that are willing to pay this.

Sean Rameswaram: Well, it sounds like the administration hasn't fully made up their mind about how they're going to roll this change out. So just in case our secretary of H-1B visas, Howard Lutnick, is listening to this show right now, What do you think a better way to reform would be?

Britta Glennon: One big reform that's necessary is just to raise the cap. It is way too low. I mean, I think it hasn't changed since the 90s with a little bit of a blip around 2000. But once you've increased the cap, then I think you have to do away with the current lottery system. The two most common reforms that I've seen that both I think are reasonable. One, it would be an auction, right, where you actually auction off petitions. And the other would be a lottery that's basically weighted by salary or something like that. Now, in both of those cases, you would just have to be careful to make sure that there's sort of some separate mechanism for like startups and entry level positions, because of course, they're going to be at a disadvantage in a system like that. But I think that would get rid of sort of this abuse issue and it would still allow skilled workers, skilled immigrant workers to come into the country and sort of create all those benefits I talked about.

Sean Rameswaram: Do you think there's any chance that that's where we end up? I think there is a chance that we end up with an auction or a sort of weighted salary lottery. I have seen some signals from the administration that that is sort of a potential option. I think the raising the cap, which actually I think is the bigger issue, that seems less likely because that would actually require an act of Congress. I don't think that's something the administration can actually do without Congress.

Sean Rameswaram: Britta Glennon, she's a professor of management at the Wharton School out there in Philly. Shoutouts to Expertise. Shoutouts to Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly for mixing the show today. Shoutouts to Laura Bullard for making sure we were factually sound. Amin Al-Assadi for editing. And Hadi Mawagdi for producing. Hadi would like to shoutout Jennifer Hunt at Rutgers. And Michael Clemens at George Mason for their help. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.