President Donald Trump’s six-figure fee for workers looking to come to the U.S. with an H-1B “talent visa” may hit some of the biggest names on the Fortune 500.
The new rule, announced last week and in effect as of Sunday, adds a one-time $100,000 fee for workers applying for a new H-1B visa. The fee does not apply to renewals.
The H-1B visa program operates via a lottery system and is mostly used in the tech industry to bring in highly skilled workers. In a proclamation Friday, Trump pointed to abuses of the program and national security as reasons for why the new fee is needed, yet some experts have said the fees will make the U.S. economy less competitive globally.
Among Fortune 500 companies, the most prolific users of the H-1B visa include top names in the tech industry. Leading the list is Amazon, which spread over two subsidiaries Amazon Com Services LLC and Amazon Web Services Inc employed 12,391 workers with H-1B visas, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon was followed by Microsoft and Meta, which had 5,189 and 5,123 H-1B visa-holding workers, respectively.
Yet, these talent visa-holders aren’t only found in the tech industry. Notably, Walmart, which came in at No. 1 on this year’s list, was also in the top 10 companies by number of workers covered under the H-1B visa program.
Trump’s order last week condemned unnamed tech companies, which the president claimed are hiring thousands of employees under the H-1B visa program while laying off American workers. Yet, there are an estimated 730,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to immigration advocacy group fwd.us. These workers are a small number of the 163 million people employed as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some experts have rushed to criticize the effort, warning the new fee will make hiring harder and stifle innovation. David Bier, the director of immigration studies at libertarian think tank Cato Institute, told the BBC the change will force companies to adjust.
“It [visa fee hike] will force U.S. companies to radically change their hiring policies and offshore a significant amount of their work. It will also ban founders and CEOs coming to manage U.S.-based businesses,” Bier said. “It will deal a devastating blow to U.S. innovation and competitiveness.”
White House spokewoman Taylor Rogers said Trump’s six-figure H-1B visa fee is meant to protect American workers.
“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down American wages,” Rogers said.
The H-1B visa program, established under the Immigration Act of 1990, was meant for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher with a “theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.” More than half of these visa holders work in computer-related jobs such as engineers, analysts, or computer scientists. Many others are researchers.
H-1B visa holders earned a median wage of $118,000 as of 2023 and together with their spouses contribute $86 billion annually to the U.S. economy as well as billions in federal taxes, according to fwd.us.
