Washington, DC, September 16, 2025 --  

Panic about rising fees for H-1B visas is misguided. Higher fees won't threaten the program, but action by Congress might.

When the Trump administration issues inflammatory executive orders, the early impact is often chaos. This was especially true last Sunday when a rebellion of Indian H-1B visa holders erupted on an Emirates airlines flight departing San Francisco, demanding to be let off the plane.¹ The subject of their fears was Trump's new $100,000 fee on H1B visas that took effect just hours earlier, compounded by corporate legal advice for workers not to leave the country.

While few people look to the Trump administration for thoughtful reform, there is some chance that Congress will do better. Yesterday, H-1B critics Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would reform H-1B visas by replacing the lottery with a prioritization system. This would allocate H-1B slots first to US-educated workers, workers with advanced science and tech degrees and positions paying higher salaries. It would also put into place stronger anti-abuse enforcement.² This would probably wipe out the existing system that mostly recruits (and abuses) lower-salaried workers often educated at lower-quality Indian institutions.

Sounds good, but this bill may go nowhere. It has been introduced repeatedly since before the first Trump administration but has yet to get past the Judiciary Committee.³ Will this time be any different?

Is this debate even relevant in the age of Artificial Intelligence? Boosters of AI argue that the technologies will replace human workers in many jobs, starting with the kinds of entry-level and relatively menial tech jobs often performed by H-1B visa workers. While these arguments have merit, there is good reason to think that the H-1B visa program might survive the AI revolution, precisely because of the dysfunction of the giant corporate bureaucracies that tend to use H-1B workers.

Much has been made of the trend toward "vibe coding" which users AI-based tools to generate computer systems based on natural language instructions. Such techniques promise to quickly produce code at a fraction of the cost of even H-1B workers. While "low code" and "no code" app generators have existed for years, such systems have been given a big boost by AI-backed language processing, which allows system designers to feed an app description or requirements document directly into the app generator.

While this can work well for app prototypes and startup companies with greenfield projects, today's vibe coding approach will never work for big bureaucracies. That's because complex and legacy business rules are poorly documented or not documented at all, requiring workers to painstakingly tease the system requirements out of their colleagues, then manually resolve countless contradictions during painstaking rounds of system testing. Building such systems requires something more akin to a protracted negotiation than quick communication. Human workers must corner their 60-year old colleague with the legacy knowledge to get an answer or make a decision. Good luck getting AI to do these tasks any time soon.

So long as it will remain cost effective, corporate giants like Cognizant, Google and Amazon will continue using H-1B workers to solve such problems. A one-time $100,000 fee won't change that calculus -- it will just mean that the giants will have to squeeze more years of work out of their indentured servants to make it profitable.

Requiring employers to pay the median wage, as being discussed in the Senate, would better change the equation. Like anything, the devil is in the details. Unlike low-level human traffickers, corporate lobbyists are great at getting special loopholes inserted to serve their interests. Don't expect the IT giants to give up their indentured servants without a fight.

Related Web Columns:

Milking the System, January 7, 2025

Notes:

1. Indian Expess, "Let Us Off the Plane": Donald Trump's H-1B Visa Fee Sparks Chaos on Emirates Flight in San Francisco, September 21, 2025

2. Times of India, Senators Unveil Bipartisan H-1B, L-1 Visa Reforms Bill: US Educated STEM Individuals to Get Priority, September 30, 2025

3. Inside Business Immigration, Proposed Changes to H-1B and L-1 Visa Programs, April 12, 2023