Last week, US president Donald Trump announced that new H-1B visa applications, the main route for high-skilled foreigners into the US, will now come with a tidy $100,000 price tag. An entry fee, if you like, to the land of the free and the home of the global economy’s growth engine Silicon Valley.
While Americans are good at charging for things that used to be free, the $100,000 price hike to hire an engineer is bold, even by their standards. The White House says this is to protect American jobs, but that’s where the story starts to wobble.
H-1B visas aren’t for fruit pickers or hotel cleaners. Instead, they’re overwhelmingly used for software engineers, data scientists, chip designers, medical researchers.
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