{"id":156226,"date":"2025-09-20T03:13:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T03:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/156226\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T03:13:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T03:13:13","slug":"trump-sets-100k-fee-for-skilled-foreign-worker-visas-1m-for-gold-card-national","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/156226\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump sets $100K fee for skilled foreign worker visas, $1M for \u2018gold card\u2019 – National"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a> on Friday signed a proclamation that will require a new annual $100,000 fee for H-1B visa<\/a> applications, among other changes to the program for highly skilled foreign workers that has come under scrutiny by the administration.<\/p>\n

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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the fee will be $100,000 per year and added that \u201call big companies\u201d are on board.
H-1B visas are meant to bring the best and brightest foreigners for high-skilled jobs that tech companies find difficult to fill with qualified U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The program instead has turned into a pipeline for overseas workers who are often willing to work for as little as $60,000 annually. That is far less than $100,000-plus salaries typically paid to U.S. technology workers.<\/p>\n

Trump on Friday insisted that the tech industry would not oppose the move. \u201cI think they\u2019re going to be very happy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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Representatives for the biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, did not immediately respond to messages for comment on Friday. Microsoft declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Trump also announced he will start selling a \u201cgold card\u201d visa with a potential pathway to U.S. citizenship. The \u201cTrump Gold Card\u201d will be available for a processing fee and a $1 million contribution after vetting. For companies, it will cost $2 million.<\/p>\n

The \u201cTrump Platinum Card,\u201d meanwhile, will be available for a $5 million contribution and will allow foreigners to spend up to 270 days in the U.S. without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income. Trump announced a $5 million gold card in February to replace an existing investor visa \u2014 this is now the platinum card.<\/p>\n

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First lady Melania Trump, the former Melania Knauss, was granted an H-1B work visa in October 1996 to work as a model. She was born in Slovenia.<\/p>\n

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The H-1B program was created in 1990 for people with a bachelor\u2019s degree or higher in fields where jobs are deemed hard to fill, especially science, technology, engineering and math. Critics say they allow companies to pay lower wages with fewer labor protections.<\/p>\n

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Historically, these visas \u2014 85,000 per year \u2014 have been doled out through a lottery system. This year, Amazon was by far the top recipient of H-1B visas with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google.<\/p>\n

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Geographically, California has the highest number of H-1B workers, according to UCIS.<\/p>\n

Critics say H-1B spots often go to entry-level jobs, rather than senior positions with unique skill requirements. And while the program isn\u2019t supposed to undercut U.S. wages or displace U.S. workers, critics say companies can pay less by classifying jobs at the lowest skill levels, even if the specific workers hired have more experience.<\/p>\n

As a result, many U.S. companies find it cheaper simply to contract out help desks, programming and other basic tasks to consulting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Tata in India and IBM and Cognizant in the U.S. These consulting companies hire foreign workers, often from India, and contract them out to U.S. employers looking to save money.<\/p>\n

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Doug Rand, who served as the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, said this amounts to a \u201csplit personality disorder\u201d for the program, with only about half of the visas each year going to traditional companies that offer long-term employment and can put immigrants on a track to citizenship. The other half go to staffing or consulting firms \u2014 and while many are established and well-known companies, others are just one-person operations that wouldn\u2019t exist without the H-1B program.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThey\u2019re basically entering the lottery so they can hire people that they then rent out to other larger companies doing actual work,\u201d Rand said. \u201cAnd so there\u2019s a lot of misbehavior and chicanery in this part of the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024, lottery bids for the visas plunged nearly 40%, which authorities said was due to success against people who were \u201cgaming the system\u201d by submitting multiple, sometimes dubious, applications to unfairly increase chances of being selected.<\/p>\n

Major technology companies that use H-1B visas sought changes after massive increases in bids left their employees and prospective hires with slimmer chances of winning the random lottery. Facing what it acknowledged was likely fraud and abuse, USCIS this year said each employee had only one shot at the lottery, whether the person had one job offer or 50.<\/p>\n

Critics welcomed the change but said more needs to be done. The AFL-CIO wrote last year that while changes to the lottery \u201cincluded some steps in the right direction,\u201d it fell short of needed reforms. The labor group wants visas awarded to companies that pay the highest wages instead of by random lottery, a change that Trump sought during his first term in the White House.<\/p>\n

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Ortutay reported from Oakland, Calif. Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t&copy 2025 The Canadian Press\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation that will require a new annual $100,000 fee for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1376,82026,43,6680,44,41,39,42,40,2845],"class_list":["post-156226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-h-1b-visa","tag-headlines","tag-immigration","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}