Now Trump is trying to chase away skilled workers with $100k visas. When policies are this stupid, you have to wonder whether sabotage is actually the point.
It is sometimes said that nations are not defeated from without but rot from within. Watching the second Trump administration roll out its economic program, one has to wonder whether we are witnessing a deliberate attempt to make America poor again. It would be one thing if this were merely ideological missteps — dopey theories tested in real time. But the measures being advanced are so breathtakingly stupid, so contrary to American interests, that it is hard to escape the suspicion that sabotage may be the purpose.
The latest astonishing example is this weekend’s “executive action” to slap a $100,000 annual fee on H-1B visas, the main pathway for highly skilled immigrants to work in the United States. There has never been anything like this in US history, and there is basically no precedent or equivalent in the civilized world. Who knows? Perhaps the courts will find a way to kill it.
For more than a century, America has understood that attracting the best and brightest from abroad is a strategic asset. The fees imposed were modest administrative surcharges, or, in the case of the EB-5 investor visa, tied to direct investment. And the benefits of this felt, knowingly or not, by every American.
Other countries sell fast-track residencies to wealthy investors, yes. Portugal, Malta, St. Kitts — they all have “golden visa” schemes. But no serious country tells every skilled worker they must fork over a fortune simply to take a job. Only America under Trump would devise such a self-defeating shakedown.
My parents were skilled migrants, and they were a net gain, working in civil and chemical engineering. My father designed the new Schuylkill Expressway in Philadelphia and my mother ran labs and they caused no harm and brought only good, then paying a fortune to send my brother and me to fancy US schools. They could never have afforded the bounty a priori, and no one would have covered it.
Multiply that by many thousands. Each year, the U.S. admits about 130,000–150,000 new H-1B workers, plus renewals and other skilled visas, bringing the total to around 200,000–250,000 skilled workers whose average salary is $118,000. At that level, a worker pays $20,000–25,000 in federal income taxes each year, plus around $9,000 in Social Security and Medicare contributions, and another $5,000–10,000 in state and local taxes. In other words, the US government recoups the equivalent of Trump’s $100,000 toll in two to three years through normal taxation.
And unlike the visa fee, which will scare off workers, those tax revenues flow steadily year after year. With 600,000–700,000 H-1Bs present at any given time, skilled immigrants generate $20–25 billion annually in tax revenue — funding entire federal agencies in the process. Paying for Social Security, inter alia.
Add to that the consumer spending: with roughly $70,000 in disposable income per worker per year, these professionals pump tens of billions into housing, cars, food, healthcare, and services. Their innovation spillovers are incalculable. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children (think: Google). Immigrants file patents at twice the rate of natives. Foreign-born workers make up 26 percent of the U.S. STEM workforce and non-U.S. citizens earn nearly 60 percent of recent AI-related PhDs. Every 100 additional H-1B workers are estimated to create 183 jobs for U.S. citizens through economic growth and complementarity. Rural hospitals would literally close without foreign doctors filling shortages that American graduates refuse to address.
Indeed, while some might claim H-1B workers “steal jobs,” the evidence shows the opposite. They mostly fill shortages Americans cannot meet, especially in STEM and healthcare, where demand far exceeds the supply of U.S. graduates. Without visas, positions are either left vacant or offshored to Toronto, Berlin, or Bangalore — shifting taxes and innovation abroad. Studies find H-1Bs create jobs, not take them: every 100 additional workers generate 183 for U.S. citizens.
The public, which most days of the year is confoundingly more intelligent than on Election Day, seems quite aware of this, and so is supportive of skilled migrants. And this is true in every country that has the economy to attract them. Rational people get that these are not the migrants that will undermine your culture and deplete your welfare kitty, but rather constitute a net gain in every way.
This is the bounty Trump proposes to cut off. The practical result will not be an $8.5 billion windfall in visa fees (85,000 times $100,000, as these simpletons calculate) — but rather demand will collapse. Employers will not pay such ransom. Workers cannot.
Instead, companies will do the logical thing: they will hire talent abroad, not in America. In the age of remote work, that is easy enough. An engineer in Bangalore or Warsaw can code for Google or Pfizer without ever setting foot in California. The taxes will accrue to India or Poland, not the IRS. And if the worker insists on moving, the company will send them to Toronto, London, or Berlin — where visas are cheap, systems are efficient, and governments actually want talent.
This will redirect not just individual careers but entire innovation ecosystems. Once Google or Moderna scales its next lab in Toronto rather than Boston, the startups, suppliers, and venture funding will follow. Clusters will develop abroad, not in Silicon Valley. The United States will have exported the very engine of its prosperity. What looks like “America First” is in practice a program to accelerate brain drain away from the country that invented the modern tech economy.
It would be comical if it were not tragic. The one consistent advantage the US has enjoyed for decades is that the best minds in the world were drawn to it, and were welcomed. To throw that away for a cheap talking point about “protecting jobs” — a point contradicted by decades of research showing that H-1Bs expand employment for natives — is an act of vandalism. It is not anti-immigrant so much as anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-American.
Meanwhile, this is what Trump had to say, from his bizarro base in the Oval Office: “We need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that’s what’s going to happen … In many cases these companies are gonna pay a lotta money for that. And they’re very happy about it.”
Of course, some people (none readers of AQL, I’m sure) will fall for the bullshit. This is a trick of tyrants and populists everywhere, which I have witnessed all around the globe. They are simply betting that the number of people who can be fooled is greater than those who will figure out the lie. This often holds, sadly.
A more interesting question is why Trump would want to do it. One theory is that the man is an imbecile, incapable of logic. While I admit that hearing him speak often lends support to such ideas, I lean against them. It seems more likely he is playing some sort of complex game with the American body politic — floating toxically moronic ideas only to abandon them up in exchange for some real concession on a truly complex issue. Or, maybe, it is on orders from Putin.
This last theory sounds like a joke, and I don’t actually believe it. I recoil from conspiracy theories. But the infuriating thing about the Trump era is that it actually makes more sense, or at the very least as much sense, as the other scenarios. Because the visa shakedown is only the latest in a pattern of Trumpist policies that betray a fundamental hostility to the American way of life.
