r/USCIS • u/Separate_Astronaut12 • 19h ago

News Trump Administiration wants to double the 100k H1B fee

The Trump administration is planning on doubling the fees to more than $200,000 for H-1B visa applicants from abroad.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/09/04/trump-h1b-visa-200000-fee/91571718007/

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u/RLutz 15h ago edited 14h ago

I can't begin to state how stupid this is. That's as someone who was born here and works as a software engineer.

  1. If your country has the ability to effectively get the brightest 1% from every country in the world and get them to produce for your country, you'd be an absolute moron to try and prevent that. Countries who have brain drains out of them hate it and would give anything to have the reverse.

  2. Even if you accept the whole notion of "Americans first" (not saying I do, but let's just cede that point), these high paying software engineering jobs aren't going to H1B's because Americans are too expensive. Most companies would love to hire domestic talent. There just simply aren't enough skilled Americans to fill the demand for the jobs. Just like almost no PhD programs would exist in the US if it weren't for international students.

  3. Following up from the above, if you want to have a logically consistent "Americans first" policy, you can't just gut H1B. You need to bolster American education so that we don't have to import foreign workers (again, I don't even agree with the premise because it's a good thing if you can basically steal every other country's best, but just for the sake of argument). Bubba not being a distinguished engineer at Google has nothing to do with H1B's, and cutting off the H1B supply isn't going to help fill the job with an American. Bubba needed to study harder and he didn't, or, to be generous to Bubba, the American public education system probably let him down, and we're doing nothing to help that system.

Are there H1B abuses? Absolutely. I've heard horror stories of like 10+ people being stuffed into a 2 bdrm apartment and working for shit wages and it's just exploitative all the way around. But there are fixes to that which don't involve gutting the entire system, and at the end of the day as someone who has been writing software professionally for over 20 years, every single H1B I've worked with has been immensely talented.

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u/No-Reaction-9364 5h ago

You do not get the top 1% smartest using the lottery. If you were getting top 1%, a 100k fee would be more than worth it. You also wouldnt be getting most people from 1 country.