The federal government has announced a $103,265 fee for each of the 85,000 H-1B workers annually imported by companies, prompting an uproar in India.
The proposed change comes as President Donald Trump needs to rebuild public support before the November election. Companies now employ at least 730,000 non-immigrant H-1B contract workers in jobs needed by American college graduates, helping to spike the unemployment and underemployment rates for computer science graduates up to 26 percent.
“This fee could also have the indirect benefit of better protecting the wages and job opportunities of U.S. workers,” the draft regulation says.
“This is a brilliant and bold stroke by DHS, which is using rulemaking to defend American graduates,” Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News. He added:
It’s no coincidence that this rule change follows on the heels of a speech delivered by [Vice President] J.D. Vance in Middleton, Ohio, last Friday, in which he made the case against outsourcing and foreign labor. Kudos to the Vice President, [DHS] Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, and director USCIS [Joe] Edlow
The draft plan will face lawsuits from many U.S. companies that use the H-1B workers to exclude and subordinate U.S. professionals. To help defeat those lawsuits, the plan exempts non-profit enterprises from the $100,000 fee, including many universities, hospitals, and hybrid enterprises that provide many H-1B workers to companies via a non-profit facade.
The plan levies the fee on new arrivals and on foreigners who are already in the United States, for example, with F-1 student visas.
RELATED: Inspector General — Businesses Will Exploit H1B Visa Status to Pay Employees ‘Dirt Wages’
The fee is getting much coverage in the Indian media because the H-1B program plays a large role in the Indian economy. The change will be strongly opposed by the Indian-run companies in the U.S. that use H-1Bs, and by India’s growing network of political groups in the United States.
The new rule — and other rules — comes amid a growing elite, public, and government recognition of the damage to American graduates and business. “This is not just fraud: This is a criminal enterprise that stretches far beyond the borders of America,” D’Esposito told Breitbart News during an interview in his D.C. office. He explained:
Without revealing too much of an investigation, I think that when complete, one of the things that will probably make the American people most angry… and will probably lead to the biggest change from lawmakers — they will probably bring oversight to this — [is] the fact that many of the individuals that you’re talking about that are selling these jobs, getting kickbacks. We will clearly outline and define their relationships with — whether it’s gangs [or] whether it is transnational criminal organizations.
The opinion shift is also forcing supporters of the program to offer minor reforms to the universe of visa-worker programs.
The draft was posted in the government’s Federal Register site on Monday. It will be formally published on Tuesday, allowing interested factions to comment on the draft for 30 days. Once the public comments are included in a second version of the regulation, the regulation may be enforced by the end of the year — unless it is stopped by lawsuits and judges.
To survive lawsuits, officials portray the plan as a good-government accounting exercise:
In addition, while the purpose of this proposed rule is to generate additional revenue to fund adjudication services, DHS believes the fee would have indirect benefits. DHS believes that U.S. employers, if required to pay an additional $103,265 fee when filing an H-1B cap-subject petition, would be less likely to hire an H-1B worker over a qualified and highly-skilled American worker unless the need is legitimate and they have no alternative for obtaining the specialized skills of the employee. Given that demand for H-1B workers greatly exceeds the statutory cap, this fee could also have the indirect benefit of better protecting the wages and job opportunities of U.S. workers, as the H-1B program is intended to do.
The draft regulation also says:
DHS is proposing to not require the fee to be paid with a petition for a cap-exempt H-1B nonimmigrant. That is because many cap-exempt H-1B nonimmigrants are employed by nonprofit research organizations, governmental research organizations and educational institutions, and DHS has decided that exempting those organizations is consistent with the application of the asylum program fee on such petitioners. See 8 CFR 106.1(f)(2) and 106.2(c)(13)(i); see also, 2024 Final Rule at 6206-6207 (discussing why DHS decided to provide certain fee reductions and fee exemptions for nonprofits and educational institutions). DHS considered recovering the costs identified in this rule by applying it to all benefit requests, however, as explained in section III.B, DHS is not proposing to recover the costs by imposing an additional fee on all benefit requestors, or all I-129 petitioners, because DHS believes that H-1B cap-subject petitioners, as compared to other benefit requestors, are most willing and able to pay an additional fee
The prior regulation can be read here.
The plan does not levy the $100,000 fee on companies that import many contract workers via the L-1, O-1, TN, J-1 or other programs. Overall, roughly 2 million foreign contract workers hold white-collar jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid American graduates.
RELATED: How Can Almost ALL H-1B Visas Go to this ONE Area of the World?
The plan says nothing about the resident population of H-1B workers. They are supposed to leave the United States after six years, but there are several loopholes that allow the short-term migrants to stay for decades.
Reporters in establishment media outlets do not have the freedom to follow the money in the H-1B and other visa programs. Their silence ensures that all useful news comes via Breitbart News and a variety of X social media accounts, plus many pro-migration professional media sites.
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