The Department of Homeland Security proposed Aug. 24 to charge $103,265 for each of the 85,000 new H-1B visa applicants every year, a move that would push the total cost to $203,265 for each applicant from abroad if Trump's earlier $100,000 fee is eventually upheld in court. That’s not regulation in any neutral sense. It’s a price wall, built by the state and aimed straight at workers, employers and the institutions that depend on them.
The first round already did damage. After President Donald Trump applied a $100,000 fee a year ago, fresh applications from abroad slowed to a trickle. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the initial higher fee generated $8.5 million from 85 applicants from abroad during the first five months before they were blocked in court, but because the number of applicants dropped 87%, the agency collected $28 million less during that period.
Who Pays for the Gate
Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said, "This is just a way to kill the H-1B program," and added, "This is just one of the many nails in the coffin of legal immigration in this country." The language is blunt because the machinery is blunt. A federal judge blocked the fee in June as "unlawful," and the Justice Department has appealed, keeping the fight inside the courts while the state keeps trying to redraw the terms of entry.
The H-1B program distributes 85,000 new visas per year under a cap and remained popular enough after Trump's initial fee that the work permits are distributed by lottery. Tech companies, health care organizations and universities continue to hire foreign workers who are already in the United States at the previous fees of $2,000 to $5,000. Universities and nonprofit research centers are excluded from the cap and hire tens of thousands more foreign workers. The system still runs, but only through a maze of caps, fees and exclusions that decide who gets to move, work and stay.
The administration argued Trump's initial fee didn't aim to raise money but to regulate immigration. The proposed additional fee is to help pay for the entire immigration system. The department said the proposal is to generate dedicated revenue to support the costs of administering the lawful immigration system. That’s the official script. The numbers tell a different story about who gets squeezed and who gets funded.
The higher fee is projected to generate $8.8 billion in revenue over a decade. The proposal would provide $3 billion to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, $1 billion for vetting applications to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $76 million for traveler services to Customs and Border Protection, $3 billion for the court system called the Executive Office for Immigration Review, $1.2 billion to the Labor Department and $484 million to the State Department. The apparatus wants its cut from the very people it polices.
The Institutions That Depend on Labor
Tech companies historically have been the largest users of H-1B visas. Amazon ranked No. 1 through June 30 this year with 9,337 workers approved through the program, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Apple had 3,879, Google had 3,180 and Meta had 2,563. The giants keep hiring. The gate just gets more expensive.
Universities and health care organizations also consider the visas crucial. Educational institutions participating in the program include Stanford University with 284 H-1B workers, the Mayo Clinic with 276 and Washington University in St. Louis with 219. Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, said colleges and universities employ about 40,600 faculty members on H-1B visas. Higher education positions don’t fall under the cap but graduates seeking jobs with advanced degrees do.
Dubal said, "Making the bridge from U.S. universities into the broader research economy available only to the wealthiest employers will make the United States less attractive as a place to study and build a career." That’s the hierarchy speaking plainly: access gets narrowed, and the wealthiest employers keep the bridge while everyone else gets priced out.
The University of Michigan employed about 850 workers with H-1B visas last year, according to a court filing opposed to Trump's $100,000 fee. About one-fifth of the school's 450 applicants each year would have had to pay the fee, costing the university $9 million, according to the filing from Arthur Lupia, vice president for research and innovation, and Judith Pennywell, director of the school’s international center. The workers have "highly specialized knowledge, training and skill" unavailable in the domestic workforce such as performing cardiac surgery and research in chronic disease, lasers and robotics. Lupia and Pennywell said the fee is "effectively a new tax on bringing some of the best minds to America."
Among health care companies, St. Jude Children’s Research had 199 H-1B workers through June 30, the Cleveland Clinic had 158 and Massachusetts General Hospital had 135. Anantha Shekhar, who was dean of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine, said in a court filing that he was opposed to the initial fee hike and that research "will be hampered" without H-1B visa workers. He said the school's 542 H-1B visa holders conduct "pioneering research" on mobility for the disabled, especially veterans, as well as on artificial intelligence and vision.
What They Call 'Reform'
The Department of Homeland Security said the proposal would generate dedicated revenue to support the costs of administering the lawful immigration system. The department’s funding projection was based on a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study estimated about half of employers in recent years would have hired a worker under the H-1B program even with an additional $100,000 fee because the wages for such workers are lower than for U.S. workers. George Borjas, an economics professor at Harvard University, said, "Between 45 and 64 percent of the H-1Bs hired between 2021 and 2024 would still be hired" with the higher fee.
But only 85 new applications for H-1B visas were filed during the first five months under the $100,000 fee. Other researchers disputed Borjas' findings and questioned whether foreign visa holders are paid less, including in a study in the Journal of Labor Research. The Labor Department requires employers to attest they are paying prevailing wages. The system keeps insisting it can police itself while the evidence keeps showing how quickly workers disappear when the price tag jumps.
James Kenny, a spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is fighting Trump's higher fee in federal court, said the additional fee "will make it cost-prohibitive for even more U.S. employers – especially the thousands of start-ups and small and midsize businesses who rely on H-1Bs – to utilize the program." He said, "The program helps companies expand, innovate, and create jobs across their operations." David Bier, a director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, argued the department’s latest proposed fee hike would be devastating to the H-1B program and the economy by sending jobs overseas and reducing innovation. He wrote in his blog, "The new fee-tax will crush the H-1B program, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of talented workers," and added, "The H‑1B fee will undermine American innovation, competitiveness, fiscal security, and ultimately prosperity."
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in announcing a lawsuit against the fee hike, "President Trump’s illegal $100,000 H-1B visa fee creates unnecessary – and illegal – financial burdens on California public employers and other providers of vital services, exacerbating labor shortages in key sectors." The legal system is where these fights get parked, while the people who need the work, the care and the research keep living under the fee regime.
Trump upset tech companies when he ordered the $100,000 fee on applicants still overseas in September 2025. He then upset his supporters after defending the program in November 2025, saying "you do also have to bring in talent." Some of his supporters contend the program should be abolished to reduce the competition for U.S. jobs.
The proposal for a $103,265 fee set off a firestorm of more than 5,000 comments in the first week. Alvester Johnson III, who identified himself as an IT professional in Phoenix, supported the higher fee. He wrote, "In my experience, H-1B workers are frequently used in IT support, network operations, physical security systems, and data center environments – the same roles American workers like me compete for," and added, "The low existing fees make it artificially cheap for employers to prefer foreign specialty labor over investing in or retaining U.S. workers." Edwin Zhang, who said he works at a hospital in front-line patient care, opposed the higher fee because international medical graduates are "a large, essential portion of our clinical workforce." He said, "These facilities already operate on thin financial margins. This will worsen existing national physician shortages, disproportionately harm rural and inner-city communities, and place avoidable strain on the broader U.S. health-care delivery system."
The department is collecting public comment about the proposal through Sept. 24. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Massachusetts overturned Trump's $100,000 fee in June as "unlawful." Sorokin ruled that the proclamation "does not provide any explanation for imposing a tax on employers" and that it was "arbitrary and capricious." The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the judge’s ruling in July while the government appeals, so the higher visa fee remains uncollected for now. Justice Department lawyers contend in their appeal that the fee wasn’t intended to raise money, but to "regulate immigration." They wrote, "That is wrong – the Proclamation is designed to regulate immigration, not to raise revenue. But it is irrelevant," and added, "The President also has inherent authority to exclude aliens from entering the nation."