CEOs Like Dimon, Huang Warn About the $100K H-1B Visa Fee—Here’s Why It Matters

Technology executives have been vocal this week in response to President Donald Trump’s changes to the H-1B visa program. CEOs like Jensen Huang of Nvidia (NVDA) and others have offered arguments both for and against the changes.

Huang, in an interview with CNBC alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday, said that Nvidia wants “all the brightest minds to come to the U.S.” and called immigration “the foundation of the American Dream.”

Last week, the White House announced plans to institute a $100,000 application fee for companies looking to bring new workers into the U.S. under an H-1B visa. This type of work visa is used to bring in workers who have skills that companies say are difficult to find in the U.S. and those workers can stay for up to six years. The administration later clarified that the new fee would only go into effect for new applicants, not workers who are currently on H-1B visas or are soon set to have one renewed.

Previously, employers paid a $215 fee for entering an applicant into the visa lottery that decides which H-1B workers get the visas. The number of visas that can be issued per year is capped at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for those with master’s degrees or higher.

Elon Musk, Jamie Dimon, and Other CEOs Also Weighed In

Some in the tech sector, like Netflix (NFLX) co-founder Reed Hastings, said that the fee will lead to a reduction in applications, which could lead to a reduction or elimination of the current lottery system. That would mean more certainty to the smaller number of international workers that are looking to come to the U.S., with Hastings calling Trump’s $100,000 fee a “great solution.”

“We need to get the smartest people in the country, and streamlining that process and also sort of outlining financial incentives seems good to me,” Altman said.

CoreWeave (CRWV) CEO Michael Intrator told CNBC that hiking the H-1B fee will amount to “sand in the gears” of the process, and said it will “decelerate access to certain talents” that companies like his rely on.

Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, once an H-1B visa recipient himself, has spoken in defense of the program previously, but has not commented on the new fee. Musk has said in the past that it could use reforms like “raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1-B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.”

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC-TV18 that the H-1B announcement “caught everyone off guard” and left JPMorgan scrambling to understand the details. Dimon made that statement while at a conference in India hosted by the bank that is one of the country’s biggest H-1B employers. Dimon said he is a believer in “merit-based immigration,” and said he expects the Trump administration to receive pushback from some businesses on the change.

Venture capitalist and “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary disagrees with Trump’s idea, recently saying on Fox Business that the fee will “hurt innovation long-term” and force workers who could bring valuable skills to the U.S. to other countries.

Why H-1B Changes Would Impact The Tech Industry So Much

In the White House’s statement announcing the change, the administration said the policy “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” particularly in the tech sector.

The Pew Research Center found that about 65% of approved H-1B workers in 2023 were employed in a computer-related job. Since 2012, that number has been around 60%. The next highest sector in 2023 was architecture, engineering, and surveying at just 9.4%

A large majority of those workers come from just a few countries. In 2023, Pew found that some 73% of approved H-1B workers came from India, along with 12% from China, leaving just 16% coming from the rest of the globe.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that many start-ups in Silicon Valley are concerned that the new fee could further diminish their ability to compete with the biggest tech companies for international talent, as they may not be able to afford a $100,000 fee to bring an important employee to the U.S. while larger firms can.