The New U.S. Tax on ‘Brilliant People’
The Department of Homeland Security says this “fee” on H-1B visa applications will fund administration of immigration services. The H-1B program lets businesses hire foreign workers with specialized skills if they can’t find Americans for a position. The goal of this tax isn’t to raise revenue as much as to make it much more expensive to hire foreign workers.
H-1B visas by law are capped at 85,000 a year. Because applications usually exceed the cap, visas are allocated by lottery. While the program has sometimes been abused, only 4,573 H-1B petitions were approved last year for major Indian-based consulting and IT companies, some of which have been accused of abuses.
Still, restrictionists say foreign workers are taking jobs from Americans. “If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media, linking to a news story about the proposed H-1B tax. That’s a classic straw man argument.
Businesses invest heavily in training U.S. workers, but colleges are educating too few graduates with particular skill sets that employers need—e.g., cyber-security and robotics. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, foreigners account for roughly 75% to 80% of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields.
