President Donald Trump listens to a reporter’s query within the Oval Workplace of the White Home, on Friday.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
President Trump’s newest govt order on immigration will sharply curtail a visa program utilized by lots of of hundreds of individuals presently residing in the US.
It additionally threatens some operations of the large tech firms which have tried onerous to curry favor with Trump this yr, elevating the query of how a lot return these firms are getting on that ongoing funding.
The president on Friday signed an govt order including a $100,000 payment for high-skilled employees to enter the nation by the H-1B visa program. It is a steep and dramatic overhaul for a program that many giant firms have used to rent hundreds of software program engineers and different highly-specialized employees.
Now a few of these firms are warning their employees to stay in the US — or to scramble to return by midnight tonight.
“We notice that is quick discover however returning quickly is advisable and you must make each effort attainable to clear U.S. customs earlier than 12:00 a.m. EDT (9:00 p.m. PDT) on Sunday, September 21, 2025,” Amazon wrote to workers this weekend, in accordance with an inner memo printed by Enterprise Insider and in addition reported by Reuters. (Spokespeople for Amazon didn’t reply to NPR’s requests for touch upon Saturday.)
Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase despatched comparable messages to workers after Trump signed the manager order. (Microsoft didn’t reply to NPR requests for remark; a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson declined to remark.)
The brand new $100,000 payment solely applies to new visas, not renewals or present visa holders, a White Home official advised NPR on Saturday.
The H-1B program is in style amongst companies — however critiqued throughout the political spectrum
Greater than half 1,000,000 U.S. residents are in the US on H-1B visas, in accordance with a U.S. authorities estimate in 2020. Congress permits 85,000 H-1B visas to be issued by a lottery every year, for which the U.S. presently costs a $215 registry payment (although firms then pay hundreds of {dollars} extra in charges to file a visa software, plus attorneys charges).
The H-1B program is meant for highly-educated, high-skilled employees like software program engineers or medical professionals. American firms in search of to rent a foreigner on an H-1B visa should first attest that they have not been capable of finding American employees with comparable expertise and that the foreigner will earn a wage just like what an American employee would earn.
It isn’t simply tech corporations that use this program, though they dominate it. Authorities knowledge present that different massive sponsors of employees on H-1B visas embrace JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and staffing corporations Tata and Cognizant, which place software program engineers and different employees at different massive firms.
The White Home says that these U.S. employers have abused and “intentionally exploited” the H-1B visa program to “substitute, fairly than complement, American employees with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” Trump’s govt order declared.
Comparable critiques have lengthy been raised by labor economists and politicians throughout the political spectrum, together with Senators Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) and Eric Schmitt (R.-Mo.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D.-Calif.). A 2020 research by the left-leaning Financial Coverage Institute (EPI) discovered that almost all H-1B employers do pay migrant employees lower than market charge salaries.
“This system exploits employees,” says Ron Hira, a Howard College political science professor who research high-skilled immigration and who has testified earlier than Congress calling for an overhaul of the H-1B visa program.
Hira on Saturday cautiously praised Trump’s govt order. “In quite a lot of methods, this effort, directionally no less than, is in the precise path. It is lengthy overdue,” he mentioned.
However some immigration-focused teams blasted the president’s adjustments to the H-1B program. “This coverage shrinks our expertise pipeline, undermines job creation, and fingers America’s aggressive edge to world rivals,” the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit affiliated with an affiliation of immigration attorneys, wrote on Bluesky.
Huge Tech firms, and their billionaire founders, have spent this yr attempting to woo Trump
Regardless of the final influence on employees, Trump’s steep new payment for H-1B visas is a slap within the face for the tech trade, which hires hundreds of foreign-born employees yearly. This yr, Amazon has sponsored the very best variety of employees on H-1B visas, adopted by Tata, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google.
Tesla, the electrical carmaker run by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk, additionally closely makes use of the H-1B program (and has been accused in a lawsuit of utilizing it to underpay employees).
Musk and Trump publicly fell out this spring. Now Trump’s steep new charges on the H-1B visa program highlights the extent to which different tech firms — and the billionaires who run them — are additionally failing of their ongoing efforts to curry favor with the president.
The founders and CEOs of just about all the prime H-1B sponsors have assiduously courted Trump in his second time period. They’ve attended his inauguration, donated cash to his inaugural fund, tried to stave off his tariffs by promising to take a position billions of {dollars} in the US and, earlier this month, many went again to the White Home to attend a dinner with Trump.
But the brand new $100,000 payment on H-1B visas is the most recent coverage Trump has unveiled that can make it harder — and presumably costlier — for them to do enterprise.
