Federal judge blocks Trump's insane $100,000 H-1B visa fee
If you thought your office coffee subscription was expensive, the government tried to charge tech companies a cool hundred grand just to hire an immigrant engineer. Fortunately, a judge stepped in.
The plan was simple, if you define "simple" as using a financial sledgehammer. The Trump administration wanted to protect American jobs by slapping a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas.
Think about that number for a second. That is not a processing fee; that is the price of a brand-new mid-sized SUV. It was a very obvious, very expensive wall built out of paperwork, specifically designed to make hiring foreign talent so painful that companies would just give up and hire locally.
But a federal judge looked at this tax on tech talent and decided that charging a fortune for a work permit is not exactly how immigration policy is supposed to work.
Squeezing tech startups for six figures to hire a software developer turned out to be a bit too blatant, even for federal court.
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