President Trump seems to think so. The H-1B visa was intended to be used by foreigners wishing to work in the United States in "an occupation that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge" and typically requires a bachelors' degree or higher. When President Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 creating the H-1B as we know it today, it established a quota of persons to be admitted and required that companies hiring such people fill out a Labor Condition Application, which showed that it was unusually hard to find such qualified individuals in the existing U. S. labor pool.
On the face of it, the H-1B visa sounds like a good idea. If we are going to allow immigration at all (a question that is more debatable now than it has been in the past), it would make sense to choose those immigrants who are more capable of contributing to the economy in employment sectors where there are presently shortages.
But there are always unintended consequences for any law, and lately there have been accusations that the H-1B system has been abused by companies simply wanting to hire cheaper foreign workers for jobs that they could fill with better-paid U. S. workers.
Evaluating the truth of that accusation is something I'm not personally prepared to do. But the current H-1B visas are allocated largely by lottery, plus a nominal fee of a few hundred dollars, and a recent article in the Los Angeles Times indicates that companies have been gaming the lottery system by putting in multiple applications for the same person or position. Authorities claim they have changed the rules to reduce such abuse. But clearly there is room for improvement in the way the H-1B visa is administered.
President Trump's solution to these problems is to raise the annual fee for an H-1B visa holder to at least $100,000, with a variety of more expensive visas for which the main qualification is that you're already rich and can pay a million dollars or more. Some statistics cited by the LA Times indicate that many H-1B visa holders may be earning as little as $60,000 a year, which is both an indication that the prevailing wages in the high-tech industry are not being paid as they should be for these visa holders, and that slapping a $100K surcharge on such visas will simply make most of them disappear, along with the current visa holders.
There are two main groups of stakeholders in this situation. One group consists of high-tech U. S. firms wanting to hire the best workers at the lowest wages they can get by with. Another group (or set of groups) are foreign workers who are qualified to do high-tech jobs, and would like to do them in the U. S. Over 70% of H-1B visa holders are from India, it turns out, but there are other countries involved as well.
Adam Smith's invisible hand would let these workers in at whatever wage they would accept, which would be way below the prevailing U. S. wage scale. While Smith's rule about trade barriers (namely, the fewer the better) was intended for goods, not people, extending it to free immigration is in the spirit if not the letter of his ideas. In the free-for-all of illegal immigration we have seen over the last few years before Trump came into office, high-tech companies have not benefited as much as they might have, because even with troops of lawyers at their disposal they would find it difficult to blatantly violate immigration law on a large scale, in contrast to the thousands of construction and other more menial jobs that most illegal immigrants find to do, at least at first.
On the other extreme, you have people such as President Trump and my late friend Steve Unger, who was a classic "leftie" of the old school. Two more different personalities can scarcely be imagined, but on this issue I think they would agree: keep out them durn foreigners so that U. S. workers can make higher wages.
If you take this principle to an extreme, we would halt all immigration of whatever kind, even for temporary student visas, which are a kind of back-door way that many well-qualified foreigners get here in the first place. From personal experience, I can tell you that would be an unmitigated disaster for U. S. higher education, which depends on non-U. S. citizens for a large fraction of its students and ultimately professors, who have to start out as students.
Would wages for high-tech jobs and graduate students go up? Perhaps some, but that assumes other things are equal, and after a while they wouldn't be. It's easy to forget that the world's most important resource is people, not rare-earth minerals or oil or even water and air. We are a nation of immigrants, and historically we have turned that into a unique strength by means of converting all kinds of immigrants to something called the American Way.
But if the American Way turns into something that people from other countries either can't afford, or can't buy into for some other reason, be it political, ethnic, or what have you, then the future of this country is dim. We have had practically open borders with toleration of scofflaws for far too long, and it makes sense to reform the system so that the rule of law becomes more respected. But it should be a rule of law, not a rule of men, or of one man. And laws, or rules, that change with the whims of one energetic guy in the White House are hard to have respect for.
In sum, the hundred-thousand-dollar H-1B visa looks a lot like the tariff situation or the random roundups by masked ICE enforcers. It's flashy, attracts a lot of attention and support from President Trump's base, but makes little logical sense in the greater scheme of things if you look at it from a practical view. Not only the H-1B visa system, but the whole immigration process needs a major overhaul. But in a republic, the ideas for the overhaul should originate with the public who is concerned, as well as stakeholders such as high-tech companies. That's not being done, and until it is done, we can expect further chaos and distress among highly qualified people who are here to contribute to our economy and just want to better their lives.
Sources: The Los Angeles Times carried the article "India expresses concern about Trump's move to hike fees for H-1B visas" at https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-09-20/india-expresses-concern-about-trump-plan-to-hike-fees-on-h-1b-visas-that-bring-tech-workers-to-us on Sept. 20, 2025. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the H-1B visa
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