On September 19, 2025, the White House announced a breathtaking new rule: employers will now be charged an annual $100,000 fee for every H-1B visa holder they hire. That’s not a typo. What used to cost a few thousand dollars has been turned into a six-figure toll, to be paid year after year. President Trump is calling it a way to protect American workers. In reality, it is a demolition charge set beneath America’s industrial base.
Killing the Talent Engine
Immigrants have long been the secret ingredient of U.S. dominance. They make up only about 16% of the workforce, but account for 23–25% of American patents, and those patents are more valuable by every measure. Nearly half of Fortune 500 firms were founded by immigrants or their children. Over half of America’s billion-dollar startups had an immigrant founder.
A $100,000 annual fee on H-1Bs does not just skim a little off the top, it strangles the pipeline that powers the next Google, Moderna, or Nvidia. The U.S. is not protecting its workers; it is pricing itself out of the future.
A STEM Economy Without STEM Workers
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects STEM jobs will grow more than twice as fast as the overall economy over the next decade(8.1% to 3.1%). Domestic supply is nowhere close to meeting that demand. That’s why the U.S. has historically relied on H-1Bs as a bridge. Remove that bridge, and the work doesn’t magically get done by Americans, it gets moved to Toronto, London, or Singapore.
Rivals Are Already Drinking U.S.’s Milkshake
Competitor nations have wasted no time capitalizing on U.S. self-sabotage. Canada’s H-1B open permit program for U.S. visa holders maxed out its 10,000 slots in under 48 hours in 2023. Ottawa now actively markets itself as the friendlier Silicon Valley. The UK, Singapore, and Australia have rolled out “Global Talent” visas designed to scoop up the very people the U.S. is chasing away.
Trump’s proclamation is their recruitment brochure. It tells the world’s best engineers and scientists: America doesn’t want you. Apply elsewhere.
Crushing Startups, Feeding Monopolies
For Big Tech, a $100,000 fee is painful but survivable. For a 10-person startup, it is lethal. Early-stage companies rely on immigrant co-founders and engineers to build core products. Take that away, and the next generation of disruptors never launches. The field narrows to the incumbents, monopolies entrench, and the dynamism that made the U.S. economy unique collapses into sclerosis.
Hollowing Out Universities and Research
The world’s best students come to America’s universities because there’s a credible path into the job market: study, get an H-1B, build a life. When employers stop sponsoring, those students stop coming. Labs lose postdocs. Grant competitiveness erodes. And the slow bleed begins: fewer discoveries, fewer startups, fewer breakthroughs.
A National Security Own-Goal
This isn’t just about Silicon Valley IPOs. Immigrants are over-represented in patents related to semiconductors, defense tech, and advanced manufacturing. Pricing them out is not “protecting” America, it is handing China and Europe the keys to the industries that will define the 21st century.
Legal Chaos and Investment Freeze
Immigration fees have always been tied to processing costs. A $100,000 behavioural toll by executive order is untested, possibly unlawful, and almost certain to be challenged in court. But investors don’t wait for judges. They will preemptively re-site labs and teams abroad, locking in offshoring that no ruling can reverse.
America Last
The story writes itself:
- Fewer patents, weaker labs, slower startups.
- R&D hubs shift to Canada and Europe.
- Manufacturing timelines slip because the engineers simply aren’t here.
- And through it all, the White House boasts that it is “protecting” American workers, even as it dismantles the ecosystem that created those jobs in the first place.
Trump promised America First. What he is delivering, with his $100,000 H-1B tax, is America Last, a deliberate unwinding of the very advantages that made the United States the world’s innovation superpower.
The End of the American Century
Great powers rarely collapse in explosions. They collapse in attrition, quarter after quarter of under-performance while rivals compound their gains. That is exactly what this Trump policy ensures. The U.S. built its dominance on openness, talent, and innovation. Closing that door with a $100,000 padlock is not strategy. It is suicide.
History may look back on this moment, the day America told the world’s best minds they weren’t worth it, as the beginning of the end of the American century.
