White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that a new $100,000 visa fee ‘applies only to new visas, not renewals [or] current holders.’
The White House on Sept. 20 clarified that a plan to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applicants will apply only to new visas after an executive proclamation on Sept. 19 caused confusion for many current H-1B visa holders.
“This is NOT an annual fee. It’s a one time fee that applies only to the petition [for a visa]. … This applies only to new visas, not renewals, and not current holders,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a Sept. 20 post on X.
Leavitt also clarified that H-1B holders who are currently outside the United States won’t be charged $100,000 to reenter.
The post sought to assuage some of the largest concerns that had been expressed following President Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation on Sept. 19.
Trump announced the six-figure fee for new applicants to the high-skilled labor H-1B visa program. He also announced a proposal for a new $1 million “gold card” visa as a pathway to citizenship.
In the proclamation, Trump wrote that the H-1B program was intended to bring workers in on a temporary basis “to perform additive, high-skilled functions” but has been “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”
H-1B visas have drawn increasing attention, particularly in the tech and computer science industry, in which tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and others have relied heavily on visas. Critics—including the administration—say the system has been abused to the detriment of American workers.
A White House fact sheet on the presidential proclamation states that U.S. companies are “laying off their American technology workers and seemingly replacing them with H-1B workers.”
The fact sheet notes that the substantial rise in H-1B workers in tech-based fields, stating that these workers made up 32 percent of the IT industry in 2003, while in recent years, that figure has exceeded 65 percent.
According to the White House, recently graduated computer science majors face an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, and computer engineering graduates have an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent—more than double the unemployment rate faced by recent graduates in biology or art history.
The proclamation will likely face challenges in court. If it survives legal challenges, the proclamation’s terms would go into effect during the next lottery for H-1B workers.
The fee is a significant increase from the current application fee of $215, and Trump said it would return the program to its “additive, high-skilled” focus.
The White House also stated that the proclamation allows for “case-by-case exemptions if in the national interest,” at the discretion of the homeland security secretary.
On Sept. 19, Trump also signed an executive order to allow wealthy foreigners to pay a seven-figure sum in exchange for access to an expedited immigration process.
The executive order states that to receive access to the process, an individual must make “an unrestricted gift to the Department of Commerce,” which is permitted under existing law.
It sets the rate at $1 million for an individual petitioning for a visa on their own behalf or $2 million for an individual being sponsored by a corporation or similar entity.
Trump presented the “gold card” proposal to Congress in his first policy address on March 5.
At the time, he proposed a $5 million fee to receive such a card.
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