US visa costs: Tech companies scramble to find foreign employees
Starting tomorrow, a popular US work visa will cost $100,000 per year. This move is also hitting the tech sector hard.
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A change to a frequently used US work visa is currently putting pressure on many US employers: foreign employees working in the US on an H-1B visa will in future be required to pay $100,000 per year. This was decreed by US President Donald Trump, with a very short deadline. Starting on Sunday, September 21, the fee will be payable by anyone with an H-1B visa who wants to enter the US.
This will hit global tech companies from America such as Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft hard, but also all other employers who rely on foreign personnel. Many of the affected workers come from India. As reported by the Times Of India, it was the country to which H-1B visas were most frequently issued. The newspaper cites government data showing that 71 percent of such visas went to India and 11.7 percent to China. According to the data, Amazon and its cloud division Amazon Web Services alone received 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta received over 5,000.
Email alerts to H-1B holders
The new conditions come as a surprise to the US economy. The Reuters news agency reports that Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, and Amazon are asking H-1B holders in their workforce to stay in the US if possible until the government provides more detailed travel guidelines – and to enter the country as soon as possible, before midnight on Sunday, when the new visa fees take effect.
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The US government's main aim with the new rules is to strengthen its own labor market. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that anyone who wants to hire and train someone new should choose a graduate from one of America's great universities. The H-1B visa, on the other hand, should only be available to highly qualified workers for whom an additional fee of $100,000 is still worthwhile for companies.
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