A billionaire investor has slammed a new $100,000 annual charge on H-1B visas as a “brutish extortion scheme” in an op-ed for the Financial Times. The fee, levied on employers, is part of the Trump administration’s effort to go after the most common route for highly skilled foreign professionals to work in the United States — a program that has long been entangled with talent pipelines feeding technology giants.
The H-1B program annually admits 85,000 workers, with an additional 20,000 for U.S. advanced degrees. By rendering every approved new hire much, much more expensive on a recurring basis, the new charge would immediately reorder staffing decisions across the industry — from investments into cloud and AI infrastructure to chip design and enterprise software.
Why Moritz says the H-1B fee misses the mark
The measure misdiagnoses how and why companies employ H-1B visas, Moritz says. The intention, he argues, isn’t to undermine domestic workers but to meet specialized needs when hiring markets are tight. Punishing employers, he warns, will only make the flight of high-value engineering work to Warsaw, Istanbul and Bangalore instead of more jobs remaining in the United States.
The veteran venture capitalist also invokes his own immigrant narrative: he arrived in the U.S. on the predecessor to today’s H-1B. His griping, however scathing in tone, reflects a practical worry many founders share — that the cost and uncertainty of U.S. hiring already push teams to build abroad.
Economic stakes for tech and startups under H-1B fee
Employers already pay several thousand dollars per H-1B petition in government and anti-fraud fees, plus optional premium processing on top of that. A surcharge in six figures annually would be something new entirely, and it changes the economics of recruitment and retention — particularly for startups that don’t have hundreds of souls on a headcount with which to amortize costs or margin pressure that’s almost endless.
Studies from the National Foundation for American Policy have found that access to high-skilled visas has been associated with more patenting and job creation. Immigrants have also founded a substantial portion of iconic American companies; half or more, by NFAP’s count, of U.S.-based unicorns (privately held startups valued at $1 billion or more) have had an immigrant founder. People like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai are often brought up as shining examples of leaders whose careers illustrate the long-term benefits of being open to the best talent from anywhere in the world.
New figures from the Labor Department, for example, reveal that positions in tech filled by H-1B candidates are paying salaries north of six figures — disdaining the notion that companies employing the program view it as a way to cap pay. Opponents of the new fee argue that the policy confuses the act of abuse, which regulators can and should police, with a blanket penalty that hits hardest at responsible employers.
Policy environment and global competition
The U.S. is not alone in the battle for skilled workers. Canada’s Global Talent Stream has 2-week processing for some positions. The UK’s Scale-up and Global Talent routes are specifically created to act as pathways for high-impact hires. The United Arab Emirates and others have structured long-term visas to attract entrepreneurs and researchers.
Against that backdrop, a significant recurring surcharge runs the risk of sending the signal that we want businesses to locate mission-critical teams elsewhere. R&D begets R&D, industry groups say: Once a product team leaves, jobs in design, security and operations often follow. The result downstream is fewer surplus jobs, and fewer local innovation networks.
What critics propose instead of a steep H-1B surcharge
Moritz is a proponent of increasing, not restricting, high-skilled immigration. He suggests doubling or tripling the H-1B cap and providing an automatic green card to any STEM PhD graduates from top U.S. institutions. Similar ideas have appeared in bipartisan proposals over the years supported by universities, research labs and a wide variety of employers.
Studies by the Congressional Research Service and the National Academies have linked skilled immigration to gains in productivity, innovation and economic growth. Among the policy alternatives identified by critics are a tougher crackdown on bad actors, speedier resolution of claims to minimize uncertainty and targeted reforms to avoid cracking down wholesale but pricing out the good guys.
Legal and market fallout to watch if the fee advances
Business coalitions are likely to challenge the fee, arguing that it’s impossible to justify such a substantial fee under current statutory authority. Immigration lawyers also expect a proliferation of contingency planning: more remote-first teams, greater nearshore hubs and larger overseas engineering centers to hedge against U.S. policy volatility.
Moritz’s rhetoric — scrambling up the mob-style shakedown airwaves captured by the above video — perfectly conveys the growing exasperation of a sector that has for decades been lobbying for predictable, skills-focused rules. Whether the fee stands up to legal challenge or not, the signal it sends is already changing boardroom calculations about which countries are going to be home to the next wave of products and patents.
