Trump’s new $100K fee on H-1B visas will hurt the tech companies trying to woo him

President Trump’s latest executive order on immigration will sharply curtail a visa program used by hundreds of thousands of people currently living in the United States.

It also threatens some operations of the big tech companies that have tried hard to curry favor with Trump this year, raising the question of how much return those companies are getting on that ongoing investment.

The president on Friday signed an executive order adding a $100,000 fee for high-skilled workers to enter the country through the H-1B visa program. It’s a steep and dramatic overhaul for a program that many large companies have used to hire thousands of software engineers and other highly-specialized workers.

Now some of those companies are warning their workers to remain in the United States — or to scramble to return by midnight tonight.

“We realize this is short notice but returning soon is advisable and you should make every effort possible to clear U.S. customs before 12:00 a.m. EDT (9:00 p.m. PDT) on Sunday, September 21, 2025,” Amazon wrote to employees this weekend, according to an internal memo published by Business Insider and also reported by Reuters. (Spokespeople for Amazon did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment on Saturday.)

Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase sent similar messages to employees after Trump signed the executive order. (Microsoft did not respond to NPR requests for comment; a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson declined to comment.)

The new $100,000 fee only applies to new visas, not renewals or current visa holders, a White House official told NPR on Saturday.

The H1-B program is popular among businesses — but critiqued across the political spectrum

More than half a million U.S. residents are in the United States on H-1B visas, according to a U.S. government estimate in 2020. Congress allows 85,000 H-1B visas to be issued through a lottery each year, for which the U.S. currently charges a $215 registry fee (though companies then pay thousands of dollars more in fees to file a visa application, plus lawyers fees).

The H-1B program is intended for highly-educated, high-skilled workers like software engineers or medical professionals. American companies seeking to hire a foreigner on an H-1B visa must first attest that they haven’t been able to find American workers with similar skills and that the foreigner will earn a salary similar to what an American worker would earn.

It’s not just tech firms that use this program, although they dominate it. Government data show that other big sponsors of workers on H-1B visas include JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and staffing firms Tata and Cognizant, which place software engineers and other workers at other big companies.

The White House says that these U.S. employers have abused and “deliberately exploited” the H-1B visa program to “replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” Trump’s executive order declared.

Similar critiques have long been raised by labor economists and politicians across the political spectrum, including Senators Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) and Eric Schmitt (R.-Mo.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D.-Calif.). A 2020 study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that most H-1B employers do pay migrant workers less than market rate salaries.

“The program exploits workers,” says Ron Hira, a Howard University political science professor who studies high-skilled immigration and who has testified before Congress calling for an overhaul of the H-1B visa program.

Hira on Saturday cautiously praised Trump’s executive order. “In a lot of ways, this effort, directionally at least, is in the right direction. It’s long overdue,” he said.

But some immigration-focused groups blasted the president’s changes to the H-1B program. “This policy shrinks our talent pipeline, undermines job creation, and hands America’s competitive edge to global rivals,” the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit affiliated with an association of immigration lawyers, wrote on Bluesky.

Big Tech companies, and their billionaire founders, have spent this year trying to woo Trump

Whatever the ultimate impact on workers, Trump’s steep new fee for H-1B visas is a slap in the face for the tech industry, which hires thousands of foreign-born workers every year. This year, Amazon has sponsored the highest number of workers on H-1B visas, followed by Tata, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google.

Tesla, the electric carmaker run by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk, also heavily uses the H-1B program (and has been accused in a lawsuit of using it to underpay workers).

Musk and Trump publicly fell out this spring. Now Trump’s steep new fees on the H-1B visa program highlights the extent to which other tech companies — and the billionaires who run them — are also failing in their ongoing efforts to curry favor with the president.

The founders and CEOs of almost all of the top H-1B sponsors have assiduously courted Trump in his second term. They’ve attended his inauguration, donated money to his inaugural fund, tried to stave off his tariffs by promising to invest billions of dollars in the United States and, earlier this month, many went back to the White House to attend a dinner with Trump.

Yet the new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas is the latest policy Trump has unveiled that will make it more difficult — and possibly more expensive — for them to do business.