Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

It is, however, a great opportunity for Canada and Western Europe to snatch all those people who now aren't able to come to the United States.

I know for a fact that multinational companies are expanding in exactly those areas (plus India) for exactly the reason that it's become very difficult to hire and move people to the US.

Those workers aren't paying taxes in the United States, and obviously the companies hiring people outside of the US aren't going to hire people for those positions in the United States.

Yeah it's even worse than that. These big cos will be incentivized to move whole teams out of the US since it will be easier to hire from other countries for offices in Paris / Zurich / Warsaw / etc.

Right. The current problem with H-1B is that we end up with a wide range of talent, ambition, and work ethic among the people brought in on that visa. In my experience, the total mix is not much different from the range you'd find in US-born workers. But we should be granting visas to the best and the brightest to come here.

I wouldn't mind a new policy that would raise the median "quality" of the H-1B visa holder, even if that meant the total number is lower. Sure, Canada and Western Europe can take the mediocre people we'd no longer be granting visas to, but so what.

But this $100k policy is not going to increase the median quality of candidates. I actually don't think it's going to have a huge affect on things; it's just a token effort to "do something" that Trump's base will eat up, and he'll declare it a success even if there's no improvement or it makes things worse.

Isn't that already the case, though? Offshoring has been a thing for decades, but companies clearly prefer to have employees on site, in the US, if possible.

Yes, this new fee will make that more expensive to do, but I'm not convinced it will no longer be worth it for most companies.

You think immigration in Western Europe is easy? It depends where, for one thing. It's getting more onerous and there are pressures to make it more so. How good is your French? More importantly, how might a 60K Euro/yr salary feel when you're paying 2-2500 a month in rent to be near work ?

Canadian salaries are also notoriously low in tech.

US is the outlier. Canadian tech salaries are much higher than European, and when working remotely for a US company the compensation overlaps the US salary bands very substantially.

However the ceiling in the US is so much higher that it still makes sense for many to tolerate the chaos and uncertainty of moving here for work.

Exactly. It's an adventure of sorts, and if you're in tech you're in a small percentage of the world population that can gain some degree of wealth. A lot in some cases. It's a risk that's attracted people to the US for centuries. Many people, and I'll admit to being one of them, hope to get some savings, and then move to one of those low wage European countries with a better quality of life!