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 latest executive order on immigration will sharply curtail a visa program utilized by lots of of hundreds of individuals at the moment residing in the USA.
It additionally threatens some operations of the large tech firms which have tried hard to curry favor with Trump this 12 months, elevating the query of how a lot return these firms are getting on that ongoing funding.
The president on Friday signed an executive 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 thousands of software engineers and different highly-specialized employees.
Now a few of these firms are warning their employees to stay in the USA — or to scramble to return by midnight tonight.
“We understand that is quick discover however returning quickly is advisable and it is best to 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 keeping with an inner memo revealed by Business Insider and likewise reported by Reuters. (Spokespeople for Amazon didn’t reply to NPR’s requests for touch upon Saturday.)
Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase despatched related messages to workers after Trump signed the chief 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 instructed NPR on Saturday.
The H-1B program is common amongst companies — however critiqued throughout the political spectrum
Greater than half one million U.S. residents are in the USA on H-1B visas, in keeping with a U.S. government estimate in 2020. Congress permits 85,000 H-1B visas to be issued by a lottery every year, for which the U.S. at the moment prices a $215 registry payment (although firms then pay thousands of dollars more in charges to file a visa utility, plus legal professionals charges).
The H-1B program is meant for highly-educated, high-skilled employees like software program engineers or medical professionals. American firms looking for to rent a foreigner on an H-1B visa should first attest that they have not been capable of finding American employees with related expertise and that the foreigner will earn a wage just like what an American employee would earn.
It is not simply tech companies that use this program, though they dominate it. Government data present that different large sponsors of employees on H-1B visas embrace JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and staffing companies Tata and Cognizant, which place software program engineers and different employees at different large firms.
The White Home says that these U.S. employers have abused and “intentionally exploited” the H-1B visa program to “change, quite than complement, American employees with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” Trump’s government order declared.
Related 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 study by the left-leaning Financial Coverage Institute (EPI) discovered that almost all H-1B employers do pay migrant employees lower than market price 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 government order. “In a whole lot of methods, this effort, directionally a minimum of, is in the fitting path. It is lengthy overdue,” he stated.
However some immigration-focused teams blasted the president’s modifications to the H-1B program. “This coverage shrinks our expertise pipeline, undermines job creation, and fingers America’s aggressive edge to international rivals,” the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit affiliated with an affiliation of immigration legal professionals, wrote on Bluesky.
Large Tech firms, and their billionaire founders, have spent this 12 months 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 year, 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 virtually all the high H-1B sponsors have assiduously courted Trump in his second time period. They’ve attended his inauguration, donated money to his inaugural fund, tried to stave off his tariffs by promising to speculate billions of {dollars} in the USA 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 newest coverage Trump has unveiled that may make it more difficult — and probably dearer — for them to do business.
