This program is likely to hurt American workers — and the whole economy.
With one declaration, President Donald Trump upended an aspect of our immigration system.
Last week, Trump announced that the US would begin imposing a $100,000 fee for all new H-1B visa applications — that is, the visa that high-skill foreign professionals use to work in the US. By hiking the fee to such an exorbitant sum, Trump hopes to compel companies to turn to high-skill American workers instead – not to mention bring in revenue.
“We’re going to take that money and we’re going to reduce taxes, we’re going to reduce debt,” he said. Workers in tech, finance, medicine, and science make up the majority of the 85,000 people awarded H-1B visas each year.
It’s the latest plank in the administration’s restrictive immigration policy, one that the administration argues will benefit Americans.
But Britta Glennon, an economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, sees it differently. “We actually have a lot of evidence showing the positive benefits that H-1B workers and skilled immigrants more generally have brought to the US,” Glennon told the Today, Explained podcast. She worries that Trump’s new policy will erode America’s innovative capacity and dim its future prospects.
Below is an excerpt of Glennon’s conversation with host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
President Trump signed this new decree that says it’ll cost $100,000 for an H-1B visa. This is something that you specialize in; I wonder what you think of this decision.
The short answer is: I don’t think it’s a good idea.
The fee before this was somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000, depending on the type of company and a variety of other things. As a result, I think it’s going to really constrain the use of the H-1B program, which is going to hurt the US economy and the American worker. We actually have a lot of evidence showing the positive benefits that H-1B workers and skilled immigrants more generally have brought to the US.
Just to lay out some of them, so that we kind of understand what’s at stake here: Immigrants are extremely innovative. There’s one paper that found that even though they account for about 14 percent of the US population, they’re responsible for 36 percent of aggregate innovation. Some of that is because they actually make Americans more innovative.
