Are $100K H-1B Visas a Good Idea?

 

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

Engineering and the Immigration Crisis

 

As I write this, the U. S. Supreme Court has just issued a temporary order allowing Title 42, a border restriction applied during the Trump administration, to remain in place until the Court makes a later decision.  This may or may not stem the tide of many thousands of immigrants, largely from Central and South America, who are massing at the U. S. - Mexico border in hopes that the end of Title 42 will increase their chances to enter, and remain in, the United States.

 

At first glance, this ongoing crisis seems to have little to do with engineering as a profession.  But engineers are people, and people have to come from somewhere. 

 

The issue of illegal immigration was brought home to me some years ago when I offered a temporary research job to a bright undergraduate in one of my classes.  He asked to speak to me in private, and when I met him in my office he said, "Well, I'd like to take the job but I can't."

 

"Why not?" I asked.

 

"If they search for a Social Security number for me, they won't find one."  It turns out his parents were Mexican immigrants who entered the U. S. illegally when he was only a child—a Dreamer, in other words.  While I couldn't do anything for him after that, another faculty member helped him get a job at a private company upon graduation, apparently together with legal help to deal with his immigration status.  He has done quite well professionally, and while I don't know if he has obtained U. S. citizenship yet, he deserves to as far as I'm concerned.

 

The problem of immigration over and above what is legally allowed is a classical dilemma.  On the one hand, there is the question of respect for the rule of law.  A sovereign nation has a right to regulate the influx of immigrants as it sees fit, and the U. S. has gone through three distinct phases with regard to immigration policy since the 1860s.  From then up to about 1920, basically almost anyone who wanted to come to this country could do so, with some racially-based exceptions that discriminated against groups such as the Chinese.  A chart from the Migration Policy Institute shows that from 1860 to 1920, nearly 15% of U. S. residents were immigrants, meaning they were born outside the U. S. 

 

Following World War I, a nativist tendency in politics led to the enactment of severe restrictions on immigration with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which allowed only a few select (mostly Northern European) countries to send a few people a year here, relatively speaking.  This sent the percentage of immigrant residents into a long decline, which bottomed out at about 5% in 1970, as the absolute number of immigrants entering the country fell from 1930 to 1970. 

 

The attitude toward immigration changed again in the 1960s, and the quota system was repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  As a result, immigration (both legal and the other kind) began a steep increase which has not yet stopped, although COVID-19 slowed it down some.  As a result, the percentage of U. S. residents who are immigrants has now almost returned to its historic level of 15%.

 

The other horn of the immigration dilemma is the morality of the thing.  The Old Testament Hebrew prophet Malachi had hard words for "'. . . those who turn aside the alien, and do not fear Me,' says the Lord of hosts."  There is the admirable sentiment on a bronze plaque displayed at the Statue of Liberty with the words "Give me your tired, your poor . . . " and most of the migrants huddled just south of El Paso as I write qualify as tired and poor. 

 

In the long run, the only national resource that counts is people.  Without people, you don't have a country—you have Antarctica.  In America's annals of racism, different immigrant groups came under the scornful eye of the establishment:  the Irish following the potato famine of the 1840s, the Italians, the Jews from Eastern Europe, the Chinese and Japanese, and most recently, Mexicans and immigrants from Central and South America.  Should we have let them in, those forebears of John F. Kennedy, Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Richard Feynman, Jackie Chan, and my own recently deceased Ph. D. advisor, Tatsuo Itoh, who one day in a rare moment of personal revelation, spoke a few words about what it was like growing up as a five-year-old in Tokyo in 1945? 

 

It is impossible to say "no" to that question, but we have the advantage of hindsight in answering it.  Completely unrestricted immigration, with full citizenship granted to everyone who manages to step across the border, is an idealistic dream that could lead to anti-immigration strife and the kinds of social problems that open-arm countries like Germany are presently dealing with.  Massive disobedience of any duly passed law is inimical to good order and public discipline.  Such laws should either be enforced, or if public sentiment is no longer in favor of them, they should be changed legislatively rather than be used as a political football and kicked around by the courts.

 

That being said, America is a nation of immigrants, and in one way or another, immigration has always been a critical ingredient in the nation's success, a source of vitality and energy that we restrict at our peril.  Let immigration be done decently and in order, not by means of mobs and trailer trucks full of suffocating victims.  But anyone who wants to come here pays us a compliment by doing so, and in due time, we should let them, because they or their descendants can be the future's business leaders, artists, scientists, politicians—and maybe even engineers.

 

Sources:  The Migration Policy Institute's graph on which I based my comments can be viewed at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

.  I quoted from Malachi 3:15 (New American Standard version).  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles "Immigration policy of the U. S." and "The New Colossus," the poem by Emma Lazarus which is the source of the Statue of Liberty quotation.