South Korean Companies Concerned About New $100k Fee for H1B Visas
If Korean tech companies wants to bring their workers into American to work it is going to cost a whole lot more:
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation to impose a yearly fee of US$100,000 for an H-1B nonimmigrant visa application for a highly skilled foreign worker, as his administration seeks to ensure tech firms help train Americans rather than bringing in foreign workers.
The fee is expected to put a burden on Korean companies that need to bring their skilled workers into the United States on a stable visa program to set up and run factories in the U.S. to proceed with their investment projects.
The current fee for the H-1B visa is $1,000. The visa is meant for skilled professionals, especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, with its program subject to an annual worldwide cap of 85,000 visas.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick elaborated on the fee for an H-1B visa — a three-year visa with one renewal that could last a total of six years — as he called for tech companies to train Americans and stop bringing in foreign workers to take American jobs.
You can read more at the link, but the new fee is going to make foreign companies think long and hard about whether or not it is affordable to bring in foreign workers on a H1B visa or train an American to do the job.
In other words, no foreign investments in MAGA country and no high paying jobs for the MAGA.
Great job, Gismagas!
I’ve heard the new fee explained this way (Lewis Amselem, IIRC):
“This is a structural kill shot disguised as moderation – not a walk-back.
Trump’s team knew if they slammed existing holders immediately, the courts, corporations, and universities would swarm them with injunctions and sob stories about disruption.
So they carved out the stock, left it untouched, but put a noose around the flow. That’s the actual pipeline that kept Silicon Valley, outsourcing shops, and Indian IT mills running. Kill the flow, the stock ages out, and the model dies in slow motion.
Think of it like choking off oxygen. The body (existing H-1Bs) keeps moving for a while, but without new supply, the system collapses from within.
The real mask-off implication:
•For American labor: This is the first time in decades the cost arbitrage model has been structurally dismantled. Over the next 2–3 years, wages at the bottom tier of STEM jobs will rise, not because of “free markets,” but because the cheap labor conveyor belt is being dismantled.
•For Indian IT giants: Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant – their stock reactions already show it. Their business model is fundamentally impaired. They can’t win contracts undercutting wages without cheap visa inflows.
•For universities: The H-1B system was a backdoor subsidy to pump STEM enrollments. If the exit pipeline is shut down, the entire higher-ed incentive structure breaks. That’s a slow bleed, but it’s lethal.
•For markets: The knee-jerk calm (“oh, existing holders are safe”) is a misread. This isn’t about the next quarter. It’s about rewiring the labor supply chain. That’s far more radical.
Trump just set a fuse that detonates the 30-year experiment of outsourcing America’s brain. It won’t look explosive at first, it’ll look like a slow policy tweak. But in 12–24 months, it creates a reflexive cascade: higher wages, corporate reshoring pressure, offshoring taxes, universities losing demand, and foreign IT stocks structurally repriced down.
This is asymmetric warfare with a time delay.”
It’s a way to begin to reverse the current trend of 70-80% of IT workers in America being from India.
No other country in the world did that to their own people while simultaneously telling people in unpopular industries to “learn to code”.
Looks like Thing is trying to make fetch happen with his new word.