Weighing the price of $100,000 worker visas

Cedarville University, a private Christian school in southwest Ohio, doesn’t hire just anybody as a professor.

According to John Davis, the associate vice president of the school’s human resources department, a top candidate for a Cedarville teaching job would have experience in their field of study, along with a top degree in that field. “Not only that, they have another crucial element that is very important to us in delivering on our mission, and that is a testimony of faith in Jesus Christ,” he said.

Sometimes, that top candidate isn’t from the United States. Cedarville currently employs several foreign workers, with the federal government’s approval, while their H-1B visa applications are pending, Davis said. But that just became much more expensive.

On Sept. 19, President Donald Trump ordered the secretary of state to raise the price of H-1B visas to $100,000 each, arguing that H-1B visa workers are stealing jobs from Americans. Most analysts acknowledge the H-1B program needs reform. But while critics warn that raising the visa’s price will only move specialty jobs elsewhere and deprive the U.S. economy of essential personnel, others argue the move will improve job prospects for American workers. Meanwhile, many companies and college campuses are caught in the middle.

According to the Department of Labor, the H-1B temporary visa program allows American companies to hire individuals with a specialized body of knowledge that they can’t find in the U.S. workforce. The visa is typically used to hire workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math, says the American Immigration Council.

Congress allows U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to hand out only 65,000 H-1B visas per year, along with 20,000 supplementary visas for individuals who’ve obtained a master’s degree in the United States. Businesses can register to apply for an H-1B visa for a specific worker during a brief window of time every year. USCIS then runs a lottery to determine which registered businesses it will allow to apply for one of the limited number of H-1B visas. Companies can register to hire multiple foreign workers, but they cannot register to hire the same foreign worker multiple times during the same lottery cycle.

But before an employer can apply to hire a foreign worker and bring him into the United States on an H-1B visa, it has to attest that hiring the worker won’t adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similar American workers. The employer also has to notify American workers of its intention to hire an H-1B visa worker, and it must agree to pay the H-1B visa applicant a wage comparable to that of American workers, according to the Department of Labor.

But some companies have used the program to unfairly disadvantage American workers, argued Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation. In recent years, companies such as Meta and Apple have had to pay millions of dollars in settlement agreements after failing to recruit American workers for available jobs that the companies ultimately sought to fill with H-1B workers.

“[H-1B] was supposed to be used for specialty occupations—the term that’s frequently used is ‘high-skilled,’” Ries said. “It has become a visa that is being used for not-specialty occupations and shutting the door, not allowing American workers to compete.”

Ries said that raising the cost of H-1B visas helps American workers while still allowing companies to bring in H-1B workers. “You can still get an H-1B, but you’re gonna have to be choosier about who you’re going to get such a visa for,” she said.

But some say that approach is going to hurt American workers, not benefit them. Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council, said that President Donald Trump’s order would be a bad play in the sports world.

“Imagine you are an NBA team, and you are the Oklahoma City Thunder, and you are competing for a national championship,” Robbins said. “And your best player, the MVP, is a Canadian immigrant.”

Now imagine that the team decides it’s no longer going to accept Canadian immigrants because it wants to reserve those jobs for Americans, Robbins continued.

“If you’re a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder, are you going to be like, ‘That’s a great idea?’” said Robbins. “No. I want my team to win. I want them to be competitive.”

Since the H-1B visa system runs by lottery, it gives researchers what Robbins called a “natural experiment” in how an H-1B visa affects American businesses, workers, and communities. He pointed to a 2015 report charting the effect on local communities of H-1B visa workers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields from 1990 to 2010.

“And what’s very clear from the data is that it’s not a zero-sum game, where oh, well, if you can’t get the H-1B visa, somehow you’re going to hire an American and it’s going to create more American jobs,” Robbins said. “It’s the opposite, which is that if you can get talent to your company, it’s going to be more competitive, you’re going to grow, and you’re going to create jobs. So not only do the companies that got H-1B visas create more American jobs, the communities around them [create] more American jobs because there [is] more spending in the community.”

Some businesses might still be able to afford to bring in H-1B visa workers, even with Trump’s $100,000 price tag. But some businesses will find it too expensive, Robbins said.

“It’s going to make it unattainable for many of the companies we actually would want most to have it,” he said. “If you put a fee that is this high, that’s this punitive, you’re going to make it so maybe some of the biggest companies in the world can get it, but small, new startups and small businesses—that are where so much of the job creation is happening in this country—it’s going to be unattainable for them.”

Even though they disagree about whether Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee will help American workers or hurt them, both Robbins and Ries say the H-1B visa system needs reform.

Robbins recommended removing the lottery system from the program. Rather, allow the best individuals into the country, instead of registering a random selection of individuals to bring in. Allowing USCIS to hand out more H-1B visas to businesses and potential workers would also benefit the United States, he said.

“The number of H-1B visas was set in 1990 when the internet wasn’t even online, when our economy was half the size of what it is right now,” Robbins said, arguing that lawmakers should reconsider the fixed annual cap of visas. “In a real way, the world has changed.”

Ries from the Heritage Foundation said the H-1B visa is one of multiple government programs that unfairly advantage immigrants over naturalized Americans. International students arriving under the F visa program pay “full freight” for their education, unlike many American students, incentivizing universities to accept as many foreign students as they can.

When those international students graduate, some participate in the Optional Practical Training, or OPT, program while they await H-1B visas. U.S. businesses don’t have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on new OPT employees, so Ries argued that also gives the foreign workers an advantage over American workers.

“American students and then students trying to get their first job out of college and so on are having to compete with this growing number of foreign students, then OPT students, then H-1B visas, and then green card holders,” she said.

Ries argued that the federal government should terminate the OPT program. She also said that it should require companies to advertise jobs to Americans as well as foreign workers and require companies to have preferred hiring for American workers.

“We need to get this thing back into its original intent—back into the box, so to speak—and allow American students and American workers a fair shake at applying for jobs, being interviewed for jobs, being hired for jobs, and being retained at their jobs,” Ries said.

John Davis said that Cedarville University would be willing to pay the $100,000 fee in order to get the right candidate. But other employers may not be able to make that same decision.

“It’s going to have an impact,” Davis said. “There may be less and less employers who [are] capable, financially or otherwise, to be able to even entertain the thought of getting the top talents that they once had access to because of the price tag.”