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

While the stated intention is to prevent abuse by consultancies, I think this effectively kills the H1B program. Who will be able to afford this?

Not startups. 100k is like 75% of base comp in most bay area startups

Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.

Do startups often hire H-1Bs? I've only worked for a few, but they didn't start hiring H-1Bs until they we're fairly sizeable and had taken on a couple rounds of funding.

Certainly the $100k fee is going to make the application much more expensive (though you can amortize it across 3 or 6 years, right?), but it was already not exactly cheap to deal with the legal costs around H-1B employees.

> Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.

I think that's a vast, vast underestimation. Most companies, even not-so-big ones, will continue to pay it. Maybe they'll think twice a bit more for future hires, and try harder to find someone local, which I don't think is a bad thing. Or, of course, this could just represent another factor in downward wage pressure across the board, which is bad.