#Donald Trump# H1B Visa# US President
IBNS-CMEDIA: US President Donald Trump has signed a petition that will impose an annual $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas.
This move is likely to impact a large number of Indian tech workers, who constitute a major portion of the beneficiaries.
“We need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said from the Oval Office as quoted by CNN.
In a statement issued sharing details about the proclamation, White House said: “The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labour.”
The White House said the large-scale replacement of American workers through ‘systemic abuse’ of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.
The statement pointed out that Information technology (IT) firms, in particular, have prominently manipulated the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields.
“The share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent in Fiscal Year (FY) 2003 to an average of over 65 percent in the last 5 fiscal years,” reads the statement.
The White House said the abuse of the H-1B program is posing a national security threat.
STEM workers are increasing in the US
The statement said the number of foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time.
Experts react
Deedy Das, partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, reacted to the development and wrote on X, “If the US ceases to attract the best talent, it drastically reduces it’s ability to innovate and grow the economy. It makes US’ global competitiveness a lot worse.”
