How Trump’s H-1B visa charge is altering the expert labor market

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks before signing executive orders, including a measure establishing the new $100,000 H-1B visa fee, in the Oval Office at the White House on September 19, 2025 in Washington, DC.

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Nearly a month after the Trump administration’s surprise $100,000 payment for new H-1B visa recipients went into effect, the headline-grabbing change is disrupting the high-tech talent pipeline in two distinct parts of the U.S. economy: small businesses and venture capital-backed startups. In the short term, the restrictions are already slowing hiring and shrinking the talent pool, according to recruiters and business owners.

However, there are also signs that immigration restrictions are having the desired effect, as companies begin to look for ways to upskill their existing workforce and build new talent into American universities and large corporations.

Somak Chattopadhyay, founder of Armory Square Ventures, which manages a $60 million fund investing in software companies and is also a member of New York State’s Emerging Technology Advisory Board, said the fund’s startups have at times gone to international talent markets to find the top thinkers and, at least for now, there is no immediate alternative about where unique talent could be sought. “For the highly specialized talent in the world of AI, there are probably about 500 people in the country who understand from the ground up how to build an LLM model. We don’t have enough talent domestically to fill some of these roles,” he said. But he added that in the future, “we need to find ways to cast a wider net.”

The Trump administration announced changes to the H-1B system via executive order on September 19. The government said it wants to give American workers an advantage and end abuse of the H-1B system by requiring companies to pay $100,000 for each new visa application. Some big users of the H-1B are outsourcing companies; The executive order states that these companies pay below-market salaries to skilled foreign workers eager to come to the United States, harming the opportunities of American workers.

The new high H-1B fee comes on top of new restrictions on foreign students at American universities and other changes that increase the regulatory burden on employers. More than 60% of H-1B workers work in computer-related fields with an average annual salary of $123,600, followed by architecture, engineering and surveying.

The debate over visa reform for foreign workers continues

Some venture capitalists, including billionaire investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, have begun publicly negotiating for the government to charge real startups a much lower fee than larger tech companies, perhaps in the tens of thousands of dollars, and to lift the visa cap (a congressionally mandated cap on regular ones). H-1B visas of 65,000 and an exemption of 20,000 H-1B visas for advanced US degrees, known as the master’s cap, for the fiscal year). 2026). Hoffman noted in a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast that these are H-1B visa reform ideas that he has supported for years.

High-skilled immigrants are shifting their work focus to large companies, according to entrepreneur Eva Yao, founder of Boulder, Colo.-based Flari Tech, herself a former H-1B recipient and now a citizen. She tells CNBC that she has already advised one woman to seek a job with a large company that might be able to pay the fee.

Yao is now looking for her first employee, likely an optical engineer, for her company, a University of Colorado Boulder spinout that develops quantum sensing-based respiratory diagnostics for healthcare applications. “I do have American candidates, but when I look at postdocs and graduate students, so many are foreign students,” she said. “I work in a very specific field where we look at scientists, researchers and engineers in cutting edge fields. The first thing I will ask is what is your status. This is an unnecessary distraction,” she added.

She’s ready to help the right candidate apply for a green card, but the $100,000 H-1Bs present a much bigger hurdle for her new business.

Cross-industry AI jobs in the crosshairs of new guidelines

The restrictions have a direct impact on hiring for artificial intelligence-related jobs across all sectors of the economy. Among the larger companies still considered “small”—those with 500 employees or fewer—companies that were just looking for workers to fill AI roles have more questions than answers. “I didn’t have that budget of capital spending, IT spending or HR spending,” Amy Dufrane, CEO of HRCI, an HR education and learning company based in Alexandria, Virginia, said of comments she heard during a recent webinar her company hosted for more than 3,000 HR professionals. For many of the companies that tried to adapt to AI in their industries, “it came out of nowhere,” she said.

There are many positions to be filled – there are now more than twice as many H-1B approvals as there were in 2000. But in terms of the total pool of H-1B workers, new applicants are the minority. Nearly 400,000 H-1Bs were approved in fiscal year 2024, most of which were employment renewal applications, the Pew Research Center reported in March. Since 2013, the annual split between new applications and renewals has averaged 35%/65%.

One way for companies to adapt without having to deal with immigration policy is to upskill their workforce. These efforts are likely to intensify if they are unable to attract talent from abroad. OpenAI recently released APIs to link to Coursera to help people educate themselves. Employees working on AI applications can delve deeper and learn how to create prompts or use AI for spreadsheets and database programs. “This can be a long-term talent development,” Dufrane said.

Remote work, university recruiting, talent nearshoring

According to Brad Bernthal, associate professor of law and director of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law Technology and Entrepreneurship, the need to create a broader talent pool due to immigration restrictions could also lead to another boom in remote work. Changing global labor market dynamics are also leading more companies to explore a human talent pipeline version of the supply chain concept of “near-shoring”: finding workers or subcontracting to companies based in countries that have the same time zone as the United States. According to Dufrane, Poland in particular has successfully positioned itself as a country that can provide an outsourced STEM workforce, in a time zone not too far from the continental United States.

“I think there’s an opportunity to rethink how startups build their talent pipelines in this environment,” said Angela Blevins, director of people and talent at High Alpha, an Indianapolis venture capital firm that creates and finances business-to-business software-as-a-service companies. “One approach we’ve seen work is to hire a smaller number of highly experienced employees who can then nurture strong entry-level employees coming out of college. This not only builds skills quickly, but also helps companies scale sustainably without being overly reliant on international hiring,” Blevins said.

Reaching out to local schools is also becoming increasingly important to recruiting efforts. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, where Yao is based, officials have seen a long-term increase in the number of companies trying to develop relationships with the university. The talent war was already heating up, so talented U.S.-born students or students with very settled immigration status are likely to be in high demand. Peter Petrella, president of New York state-based TalentRise, which provides executive search, coaching and leadership development for companies based in the United States, Canada and India, says he helps clients build stronger local connections by reaching out to economic development officials in New York state and the University at Buffalo Alumni Office to begin building connections with alumni of its computer engineering programs.

Angie Vermillion, associate director of employer relations at Leeds School of Business, advises companies looking to build stronger ties with American universities to build relationships with careers teams, faculty and students over time and through multiple “touch points,” including career walks and fairs. She also said companies should emphasize career growth and the availability of mentors. “Students are attracted to clear pathways to advancement,” she said.

But for a talent pipeline that worries experts most, there is no short-term workaround or long-term solution when skilled immigrant visas take up a much smaller portion of the job market. The H-1B system has created entrepreneurs who tend to spend time working for other companies before taking the plunge into self-employment. Bernthal said he is most concerned about whether the United States can continue to innovate in areas such as climate technology, aerospace, quantum life sciences and national security. Foreign-born founders are leaders in these areas, he said.

“The founders who built Silicon Valley – if you look closely, they were both first and second generation immigrants,” Chattopadhyay said. “(Immigrants) are reaching for the fences; there’s a tough courage there. At the end of the day, if we start restricting that talent, that would be a bad thing for innovation.”