H-1B Workers Fear Uncertainty After Trump Imposes $100,000 Visa Petition Fee

The 31-year-old South Bay software engineer was driving home from the office a couple of weeks ago, when a friend called him with the news. President Donald Trump had suddenly announced his administration would be slapping a $100,000 fee on companies petitioning for H-1B visas, effective within a few days.

Standing behind Trump in the Oval Office, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seemed to say the fee would apply annually to all H-1B holders. Employers scrambled to alert staff abroad to return immediately, before Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked the chaos back on the social media platform X: “This is NOT an annual fee. It’s a one-time fee that applies only to the petition.”

But given the mercurial nature of this president and the chaotic nature of this announcement, there’s no telling if or when the policy will change. Silicon Valley has been well and truly rattled, especially the hundreds of thousands of foreign professionals who rely on the program to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“You cannot buy a house. You cannot raise a family if there is an uncertainty,” said the software engineer, who requested anonymity because of fears his immigration status could be jeopardized. “I don’t want to be here till the age of 40 or 45, and then this happens, and I have to leave. I won’t be in a situation to restart my career.”

He has been thinking a lot about risk and how it affects his life plan ever since he arrived in San Jose five and a half years ago on an H-1B visa sponsored by his employer. “Like they say, if you want to become an actor, move to L.A. So if you want to be a great software engineer, probably S.F. and the Valley is where you should be. And yeah, here I am, exploring it.”

Truth be told, his excitement to experience Silicon Valley culture cooled soon after he arrived in the Bay Area. First came the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a crimp in the social vibe he was hoping to experience, as meetups and conferences were canceled.

Then came the mass layoffs in tech, starting in late 2022. He’d moved between companies since he first arrived here, but decided to return to the relatively stable retail giant that sponsored him to begin with, mindful that H-1B visa holders have up to 60 days to find new employers to sponsor them if they’re laid off.

The Mumbai native applied for a green card, but knew he was unlikely to receive it during his lifetime. That said, the federal government has updated immigration policy to acknowledge the backlog. The American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act allows for H-1B holders who’ve applied for a green card to maintain their legal status while they wait. Even before Donald Trump became president again in 2025, the queue for Indian nationals waiting on an employment-based green card had grown impossibly long, due to antiquated caps and increased demand.

So when he first met his wife a couple of years ago, he made sure to ask her on the first date whether she saw herself moving back to India to take care of parents and start a family, as he did. She, too, is on an H-1B visa.

They recently had friends over, and when the talk turned to the visa situation, it struck him that their social circle is filled with people who’ve already given up on the United States, before the latest upset. “They just want some certainty. They cannot predict their future and life based on a visa, which is unpredictable, and it can get revoked anytime,” he said.

Since the H-1B program was introduced as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the visa has been the primary pathway for Silicon Valley companies to take advantage of foreign talent. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Arista Networks’ Jayshree Ullal and former eBay President Jeffrey Skoll all began their careers on H-1B visas. Meta, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Cisco and Nvidia are the biggest users in the Bay Area today. If the region’s employers filed the same number of new petitions as last fiscal year — about 7,660 applications — the bill would come to roughly $766 million in fees alone, according to Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

In a wide-ranging conversation last year with the four chatty investor-bros who host the “All In” podcast — three of whom were born overseas — then-presidential candidate Trump promised to import more of the best and brightest. “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, the greatest schools, and lesser schools that are phenomenal also,” Trump said. In his next administration, he said, any foreign student who completes even a two-year degree in the U.S. would get a green card. “You need brilliant people,” he insisted. The co-hosts or “besties,” as they call themselves, agreed.

Compare that with the opening line of the White House proclamation two weeks ago that levied a broadside at U.S. immigration policy for the last 35 years. “The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

“Many of my clients are senior technology executives who have lived here for 20 years,” said Sophie Alcorn, who runs Alcorn Immigration Law in Mountain View and writes about immigration for TechCrunch. She’s talking about clients still on H-1B visas, still waiting on a green card.

Alcorn called Trump’s proclamation a “huge affront” to people like her clients, who have diligently played by the complicated and confusing rules the federal government has laid out. “They have advanced degrees from U.S. colleges and universities that they forked out full tuition for. They have spouses. They have U.S. citizen children who were born here. They own homes. They volunteer in the PTA. They donate. They pay taxes.”

Already, the Trump administration has been challenged in court over the latest changes to the H-1B program. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Northern District of California on Friday, was brought by a coalition led by recruitment firm Global Nurse Force. The coalition argues President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally impose a hefty immigration fee without the approval of Congress, and that the sudden regulatory changes violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

Alcorn is not surprised. “Immigration lawyers are scratching our heads. We’re trying to figure out exactly what we can do, what we cannot do,” she said. “We don’t even know how we would have our clients pay the $100,000. When will there be a temporary restraining order? Because that could just simply pause all of this for the foreseeable future,” Alcorn said.

Concern about the growth of H-1B visa abuse is bipartisan, however. Employers as varied as Cognizant, Disney and Southern California Edison have been accused of taking advantage of foreign workers, using them as a cheaper and more compliant labor force. Cognizant was found liable in 2024 in a jury verdict.

High-tech firms have long pushed for a relaxation of the H-1B visa cap, 85,000 annually since 2006. Between fiscal years 2017 and 2022, more than 380,000 H-1B petitions were approved in the San Francisco Bay Area alone, according to the American Immigration Council.

“This is a crisis that has been 35 years in the making that a competent Congress would have addressed long ago,” John Miano, a former tech worker who became an attorney to sue over the H-1B program, wrote KQED. “The United States Congress is the only national legislature in the world that has voted to make it explicitly legal to replace citizens with foreign workers.”

Even those who hold the H-1B visas acknowledge there’s plenty of room for improvement to guard against the established abuses of the program. The South Bay software engineer said he agrees with Trump’s intentions, but not his methods.

“The way he tries executing it is so wrong that cannot be justified, because this process was there in place,” he said. “So you cannot just flip it overnight,” without upending the lives of millions of people.

Additionally, he noted that the changes are not expected to force companies, which typically pay much of the cost of an H-1B visa, to hire more Americans. Immigration experts and visa holders alike say multinational corporations are likely to replace H-1B visa holders with more workers overseas, at one of their foreign offices.

As for H-1B visa holders, there’s a menu of options. Their current employer might invite them to transfer to one of those far-flung offices. They might move to a country like Canada, China or Germany, which are inviting distressed visa holders with open arms.

The software engineer, already planning his return to India, might get a job with an American company there, maybe with his current employer, which has a significant presence in the country, albeit in cities other than his hometown. But even if he has to take a less desirable job, even if he has to take a job that pays less, he accepts that might be the cost of doing what he always planned to do eventually: return home.

KQED’s Adhiti Bandlamudi contributed to this report.