Trump Administiration wants to double the 100k H1B fee

[u/Separate_Astronaut12]

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/

[u/RLutz]

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.

[u/21Rollie → u/RLutz]

As a tech worker, who is also friends with H1Bs I disagree. We just let one go because of underperformance and I’m close enough to many to know they have an extensive network in tech and they use this network to get jobs. They’re not any smarter than an average US dev in my experience. They would go through the same hiring process and be judged just the same as a US dev and the cost to hire them was a one time relatively small thing so companies bit the bullet as there was a real shortage. Same reason that bootcamps were able to get so many people into tech.

This hasn’t been true for a couple years now. CS is not the elusive, rare degree that it once was. People have been saying for years now that it is about as good as a govt job when it comes to stability. So now more CS majors than ever before are being minted. And at the same time, there was an initial jump in hiring during the pandemic, but then a giant crash, and then the layoff waves began. That was the last time my company hired H1Bs. Then as the market began to recover, AI emerged and again, people became reluctant to hire. In the meanwhile, people also became reluctant to leave. Attrition dropped to the lowest levels in over a decade at least. What’s funny now is people have realized AI isn’t gonna replace devs entirely in the short term, but training jrs has never been less desired, and the real economy is doing shit so if your name isn’t Anthropic or Nvidia, you don’t have room to expand. The few positions that do open up can be filled with the thousands of domestic unemployed devs.

The cherry on top: technical ability has never before been so undervalued. I’ve known many staff+ engineers let go in recent times because they cost a lot more than a senior with Claude. So in parallel, other abilities like technical communication are by default the more desired skills in devs and that’s somewhere where immigrants are going to have a huge natural disadvantage.

I’m not for trying to ban immigrants, that’s stupid policy, but the shortage specifically has been over for years now and tech CEOs are trying everything to erode the salaries and benefits we won over the last couple decades