The $100,000 H-1B Visa Tax: Trump’s Policy and Its Impact on Jobs

H1B visa news 2025: Trump and his supporters have said the increased charge would dissuade abuse of the “most misused visa” and incentivise tech companies to hire American workers.

Economists, Trump immigration jobs policy experts and business leaders, however, say that Trump’s plan could have an opposite effect, slowing down innovation, taking jobs overseas and spurring a “brain-drain” of talent back to home countries like India.

Why It Matters

A sudden$100000 H1B fee on H-1B visas could trigger a “whole range of unintended consequences” that reverberate throughout the economy, including by upending industries already short on workers, like tech and healthcare, pushing employers to outsource more work to places like India, Mexico and Canada, and making US universities less attractive to international students who often enter the workforce via the H-1B program.

Jennifer Hunt, an economist at Rutgers University, told the Wall Street Journal that “could effectively close down the H-1B program. And if that’s the case, it’s going to have a very negative impact on the economy overall.”

The Bigger Picture

H-1B visas are a favourite target in US politics: Critics say that companies have taken advantage of the program to replace American workers with lower-cost overseas H1B winners and losers. Supporters of H-1B visas, however, point to numerous studies that indicate H-1B workers have no negative impact on wages, while also boosting productivity and innovation in ways that benefit the economy overall.

One 2015 study by economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber, for example, found that an influx of foreign-born workers, including on H-1B visas, actually increases wages for US visa reforms Trump. In a more recent 2023 paper, economist Britta Glennon found that when access to H-1B visas is constrained, multinational companies outsource more jobs overseas instead of hiring American workers.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Michael Clemens at George Mason University’s research institute said: “H-1B visas cause innovation. They cause entrepreneurship. They cause more R&D investment.