President Donald Trump on Friday announced an annual $100,000 fee on successful applicants for a high-skilled worker visa program that is widely used in Silicon Valley, constraining a key path to legal immigration.
The president also signed an executive order that would allow wealthy foreigners to pay $1 million for a ‘Gold Card’ for U.S. residency and companies to pay $2 million for a ‘Corporate Gold Card’ that would permit them to sponsor one or more employees.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to be reducing taxes and we’re going to be reducing debt.”
Both moves likely will face legal challenges. If upheld, however, they would dramatically tighten legal immigration systems while opening access to the U.S. for wealthy foreigners. That would deliver a win to outspoken members of Trump’s nationalist base who have argued for years that the H1-B program takes jobs away from American workers. Left-leaning critics also have faulted the program, which they say can be used to exploit workers from overseas.
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The announcement is one of the steps that Trump has taken to restrict legal immigration to the United States in addition to his moves to deport those in the country illegally.
The $100,000 payment for an H-1B visa could be made each year for six years, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Oval Office ceremony unveiling the actions. Roughly half a million people in the U.S. work through H-1B visas, and most renew their status every three years. A significant number apply for green cards through their employer to receive legal permanent residency but confront significant delays due to backlogs in processing.
“The company needs to decide … is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American,” Lutnick told reporters. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on visas that were given away for free. The president is crystal clear: valuable people only for America.”
The country’s largest tech companies were notably silent about the policy on Friday night, in a dramatic departure from their frequent criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies during the first administration.
If upheld, the restrictions on H-1B visas could upend the way Silicon Valley has operated since its founding. Many of the country’s most famous entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, once held H-1B visas, and many tech founders attribute their companies’ success in part to the United States’s ability to attract the world’s best computer scientists and engineers.
Some executives and spokespeople said they were still reviewing the implications of the policy. But the industry is remaining quiet after executives have largely supported Trump in his second presidency – working with Trump on major investment announcements or presenting him with lavish gifts.
Applicants for Trump’s gold card would need to pay a processing fee and undergo Department of Homeland Security vetting, according to a government website beckoning users to “Unlock life in America.” If approved, gold card applicants would have to “make a gift of $1 million, which has been determined to provide sufficient evidence that the individual will substantially benefit the United States,” the website said.
Separately, a platinum card offering marked “coming soon” on the website would cost $5 million and allow individual applicants to reside in the United States for up to 270 days per year without being taxed on non-U. S. income. That program will have a wait list and must be approved by Congress, Lutnick told reporters.
Both the H-1B proposal and the new gold and platinum card visa program are likely to face rapid legal challenges from companies and workers, said David Bier, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. Under federal law, he said, only Congress has the power to create new visa entry programs and add fees to existing categories.
Lutnick said he expects that the Gold Card program will raise more than $100 billion in revenue and the Platinum Card program will create $1 trillion. Analysts have said such figures are dubious. They suggested the biggest market for such visas could come from wealthy people in China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, potentially raising national security concerns.
The president first announced plans for a $5 million gold card earlier this year, and Lutnick previously said that more than 250,000 people had expressed interest.
The Trump administration landed on the $100,000 fee for H-1B visas because it would deter companies from using the program to bring in entry-level employees and incentivize employers to rely on the program strictly to recruit “the great engineers” and “impressively detailed executives,” Lutnick said.
Employers rely on H-1B visas to hire foreign workers with specialized skills, usually in science and technology, when they cannot identify American workers to fill those jobs. Tech companies are the largest beneficiaries of such visas, but employers in manufacturing, finance, education, retail and health care employers also use the program.
About 85,000 new H-1B visas are available each year, although Congress exempts universities from that cap. Last year, the government received about 425,000 H-1B visa petitions. Recipients are selected through a lottery.
Current H-1B visa application fees depend on employer size and status, but rarely exceed $5,000 in total, excluding lawyer’s expenses. There is a $215 fee to register for the lottery and a $780 fee for an employer sponsor to file a petition for a nonimmigrant worker. Universities and nonprofits pay a lower fee than private employers.
Trump’s coalition is divided over H1-B visas, which are important to his allies in the tech industry.
Trump’s coalition splintered over the visas during the presidential transition, when far-right activist Laura Loomer sparred on X with Trump’s top tech supporters over the program. Musk, who was one of Trump’s closes allies at the time, aggressively defended the program, but he has since fallen out of favor with Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, a top White House adviser in Trump’s first term, has railed against H-1B as a “total scam” and has advocated eliminating the program entirely.
Trump has ramped up his mass deportation campaign while also moving to restrict legal immigration, in particular targeting vulnerable migrants who are fleeing hardship, including wars and natural disasters, in their native countries.
More than 70 percent of H-1B visa holders in the 2024 fiscal year were born in India, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Chinese nationals received 12 percent of new visas. Workers from the Philippines, Canada and South Korea were also among the top recipients.
J. Mike Sevilla, an immigration attorney at the firm Dorsey & Whitney said in an emailed note that “a $100,000 fee for H-1B petitions would be devastating to several industries as it would significantly prohibit the hiring of foreign national talent in this visa classification.”
Bier said Trump’s new H-1B requirements could effectively undercut the value of hiring them and convince companies to move their operations outside the United States.
Depending on how it is structured, “this would effectively end the H-1B program,” said Bier, who favors significantly expanding the cap on H-1B visas or eliminating the cap altogether. “This is further evidence that companies will use to assess their operations in the future.”
He pointed to Trump’s decision in June 2020, during his first White House term, to suspend the program, a move that Bier said increased offshoring of jobs.
“That’s exactly the opposite of the policy the president says he is pursuing, which is onshoring. It makes no sense,” he said.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for governmental relations for the American Council on Education, said the changes would be really difficult for colleges and universities, which rely on H-1B workers for faculty positions, especially in high-need STEM fields.
“It’s going to cost institutions of higher education and other U.S. businesses a lot more money to bring in skilled talent that we may not otherwise be able to fulfill with the current workforce,” she said,” and I think it’s going to restrict our ability to find the best people for the jobs.”
Adam Kovacevich, a former Google executive and the CEO of Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning industry trade council, said that “Trump talks about attracting the world’s best minds, but now he wants to impose a six-figure talent tax.”
“We’re not going to win the AI race if we slam the door on top talent,” he added.
But Ira Mehlman, media director at the Federation of American Immigration Reform – a restrictionist group that supports a merit-based immigration system in which high-skilled workers have precedence over families – said Trump’s announcements appear to be a step in that direction.
Mehlman said the proposed fees to the H-1B program are “significant enough that the employers will consider carefully whether this is somebody they really need.”
Leaders of FAIR have previously spoken critically about Trump’s proposed gold card program, saying it amounts to selling citizenship to the highest bidder. Mehlman said the group is seeking more details about Trump’s executive order before rendering a judgment.
Amazon was the largest beneficiary of the program in fiscal year 2024, with 3,871 new H-1B employees, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan organization National Foundation for American Policy. Other tech giants – Google, Meta, Apple and IBM – rank among the top 10. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Congress created the H-1B program in 1990 to address labor shortages. Critics on both the left and right say the program and lottery allows certain employers to exploit the system and underpay foreign workers to do jobs that American workers could fill.
Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University who has researched the issue for decades, said that the $100,000 fee as well as higher pay standards could help improve a system that allows Silicon Valley companies to profit off cheaper foreign-born labor.
“The idea here is to signal you’re really bringing in somebody super specialized if an employer is willing to pay $100,000,” Hira said. “One of the criticisms is they’re bringing in people with ordinary skills and the reason employers like them is not because they have special skills but because they’re cheaper and they’re indentured to their employer.”