In the span of a few hours on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be implementing a fee of over $103,000 on H-1B visas, and news broke that the State Department plans on revoking the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers — which, according to The Associated Press, would be the largest mass visa revocation in US history.
More than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s become clear that the only way Trump can get the deportation numbers he wants is by stripping legal immigrants of status. Beyond having ICE arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, the administration is pressuring noncitizens to “self-deport,” in some cases imposing civil fines on them and threatening to seize their assets. It’s creating legal hurdles not only for new legal immigrants but for those already in the country, and in the process, likely hurting businesses and social services nationwide.
H-1B visas are often seen as synonymous with Big Tech, in no small part because Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are the three biggest employers of H-1B workers. A federal judge struck down Trump’s previous attempt to raise the cost of these high-skilled employment visas in June, but not until over 70 employers paid the $100,000 fee. Now Trump wants to raise the cost to $103,265. Advocates and business leaders are worried Trump will soon come after the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which DHS hinted may soon carry a $100,000 fee of its own. OPT lets international students work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for some STEM students and additional extensions for holders of certain graduate degrees.
“Every single other pathway is harder, outlawed, eliminated, more bureaucratic, more difficult across the board.”
“This is clearly unlawful,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration reform organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2013. “We don’t have to guess what this is for. This is to get rid of the OPT and H-1B program, which will have upstream and downstream devastating consequences: companies will be started elsewhere, people will be hired elsewhere.”
This won’t just hurt the tech industry. The previous fee hike exacerbated labor shortages at rural hospitals across the country and Alaska public schools, both of which have increasingly turned to high-skilled immigrant workers in the wake of local population decline. If the $100,000 fee was an inconvenience for Amazon and Meta, it was utterly catastrophic for rural communities already having trouble attracting qualified candidates.
Foreign workers aren’t the only legal immigrants Trump is targeting. According to the AP, which broke the news, the State Department will rescind up to 200,000 business and travel visas issued between 2016 and 2026 to people who applied for asylum after arriving in the US. Beyond limiting their ability to travel outside the country, this move won’t change much for asylum seekers who came to the US on nonimmigrant visas — at least not for now. But Schulte said the visa revocations are part of Trump’s efforts to gut the humanitarian immigration system. “Every single other pathway is harder, outlawed, eliminated, more bureaucratic, more difficult across the board,” he said. “It’s an all-of-government approach.”
The administration is framing this change as a way of closing a loophole in the asylum system: people coming to the country on nonimmigrant visas, ostensibly for work or pleasure, only to ask for asylum upon setting foot in the country.
“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told the AP.
But the people who applied for asylum this way didn’t break any laws. In fact, a person needs to be present on US soil to apply for asylum; there’s no way to apply from outside the country. And Trump has closed most other avenues for humanitarian migration. There’s an effective “asylum ban” in place at the US-Mexico border. Refugee admissions have dropped to record lows, and the administration is now prioritizing the resettlement of white South Africans and denying almost everyone else.
In his second term, Trump has shown that the only immigrants he wants are those who look a certain way — or who can pay a small fortune for the privilege of working in America.