Story by Oleen Ndori, Foreign Editor
ECONOMISTS have warned that the United States’ decision to impose a US$100 000 fee on H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers could hurt US economic growth.
On September 19, 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation introducing the application fee for the H-1B visa aimed at encouraging companies to employ more American workers.
The new rule would require US companies to pay for their new applicants an annual fee of a US$100 000 for each highly skilled foreign worker holding an H1B visa.
Reports say the increase represents a blow to big tech companies, which rely heavily on such visas to hire engineers, scientists, and coders from overseas, particularly India.
Statistics from 2024 indicate that firms such as Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple were leading sponsoring the H-1B visa.
In an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), a former senior editor at U.S. News and World Report, Joseph Williams, asserted that the policy change would deal a heavy blow to many of the country’s smaller businesses.
“Few people have the kind of deep pockets that pay US$100 000 for an employee that may be here two, three years, maybe four, who knows, but it is a one-time expense that a lot of small companies, start-ups, and non-profits can not pay; they do not have those kinds of deep pockets. It is not designed to help them. It is designed to give a leg up to some larger corporations. And it is also designed to send a message on immigration and that Trump is trying to crack down and try and promote more Americans for these jobs,” he said.
He added that the visa will deter prospective foreign workers from coming to the US, ultimately harming the country’s competitiveness and future economic growth.
“The big problem there is that in the United States, one of the main reasons why we have these visas is that the U.S. is not producing nearly enough people in the kind of skilled jobs or that can do the kind of skilled jobs that foreign experts can. I am thinking about the raid on Hyundai, we had people coming from Korea who knew how to do this, who knew how to establish and step up a company.”
On September 4, the US Immigration crisis deepened after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the construction site of an electric vehicle battery plant run by a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution.
A total of 475 individuals were arrested, including 316 South Korean workers who had been held at the Folkston Detention Centre in Georgia.
This sparked a diplomatic tiff between the US and South Korea, with Seoul saying it will address problems faced by Korean workers with U.S. visas before proceeding with a US$350 billion investment package that is part of a bilateral trade deal between the two countries.
