President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Friday introducing a new, $100,000 fee per year for employers seeking to file future H-1B worker applications in a move that could upend hiring in the Bay Area tech industry.
“If you’re going to train somebody, train Americans,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Friday in the Oval Office. “Stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That’s the policy.”
Established in 1990 during President George H.W. Bush’s administration, the H-1B program is the primary skilled visa for foreign workers in the U.S., eligible only to those in “speciality occupations.”
Currently, the fee to file a H-1B petition – legally required to be covered by the employer – is a few hundred dollars, with an additional $4,000 fee for large, H-1B-dependent employers, while the visa – a travel document – costs $205. Trump’s proclamation, which the White House clarified Saturday applies only to future workers, would require a $100,000 payment by employers for each H-1B worker it is seeking to employ.
“Either the person is very valuable to the company and America, or they’re going to depart and the company is going to hire an American, and that’s the point of immigration,” Lutnick said. “Hire Americans and make sure the people coming in are the top, top people. Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on these visas that were given away for free.”
According to the presidential proclamation, Trump is using executive authority to impose a travel ban on H-1B visa holders whose petitions are not accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000. That means current H-1B visa holders who are outside the U.S. could be impacted.
The restriction will take effect Sunday and last a year.
Trump invoked the same authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that he used during his first term to ban citizens from certain Muslim-majority countries from entry to the U.S.
“It seems to be illegal but whether the Supreme Court would see it the same way many companies would is another matter,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank. “This clearly is not a good policy for attracting talent to the United States. It makes it prohibitively expensive for startups” to hire foreign workers, he said.
Anderson said he expects this policy to be challenged in court.
Companies in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, including Google and Meta, employ H-1B visa holders in large numbers, most commonly as software engineers, a recent Chronicle analysis found. Google topped companies for most H-1B applications in 2024, with 344 applications.
The Bay Area had the second most-approved applications of any metro area between 2021 and 2024, behind only New York, another Chronicle analysis showed.
For every 100 workers living in the Bay Area, roughly one was working on an H-1B approved in the last four years. The jobs are usually well paid, with salaries upward of $150,000 per year at major tech companies.
{ “__type”: “devHubFreeformEmbed”, “__id”: “Datawrapper”, “__fallbackImage”: “https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/u39oR/mobile.png”, “__data”: { “datawrapper_id”: “u39oR” } }
Trump also announced he will start selling a “gold card” visa with a path to U.S. citizenship for $1 million after vetting. For companies, it will cost $2 million to sponsor an employee.
The Trump Platinum Card will be available for a $5 million and allow foreigners to spend up to 270 days in the U.S. without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income. Trump announced a $5 million gold card in February to replace an existing investor visa – this is now the platinum card.
The U.S. caps the number of H-1B visas issued each year at 65,000, a quota that hasn’t changed in decades, with an additional 20,000 for applicants with master’s degree or doctorate degree from a U.S. school.
The quota amounts to about 0.05% of the U.S. labor force.
The visas, which employers apply for on behalf of skilled immigrant workers, come with minimum pay requirements.
Critics of the program say it allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers at lower wages than Americans and that the minimum pay requirements are too low.
Applicants must undergo a random selection lottery for a chance to apply for the H-1B visa.
Trump has long taken aim at the H-1B program, seeking to tighten requirements in his first term. This year, some H-1B visa applicants received government notices alleging the government was aware of “adverse information” about them, suggesting that applicants may be under stricter scrutiny.
Trump this year announced plans to eliminate the lottery in favor of awarding the visas to applicants in order from highest to lowest salaries, though opponents to the move said it may violate the U.S. statute which established the program.
Last year, the odds of an applicant being selected through the lottery were about 1 in 4, according to a report by the National Foundation for American Policy.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.