The Death of H-1B
Why Trump’s Hard Reset Was Overdue – And Why I Never Believed in It
There are moments in policy when the curtain finally drops, when the fiction collapses, and everyone has to admit the truth. For the H-1B visa, that moment came on September 19, 2025, when President Donald J. Trump announced that any new petition under the program would now require a $100,000 fee. The headlines screamed. Outsourcing firms panicked. Immigration lawyers gasped. But for me, the news carried no surprise at all.
Why? Because I never believed in H-1B in the first place.
A Program That Lost Its Way
The H-1B was created in the early 1990s with a noble intention: allow U.S. companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals when no Americans were available. It was supposed to bring in the best and the brightest — scientists, engineers, doctors, the kind of people who drive innovation.
But that’s not how it played out.
By the 2000s, the H-1B lottery had become a playground for outsourcing giants. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant — these firms discovered that by flooding the lottery with tens of thousands of petitions, they could lock up a huge share of the quota. Once they had the visas, they deployed workers into American firms at rates far below the U.S. market wage.
The system rewarded volume, not merit. Instead of AI pioneers or biotech prodigies, the bulk of H-1Bs went to mid-level IT staff, often contracted out to companies that had just laid off American workers. The horror stories piled up: U.S. employees at Disney and Southern California Edison forced to train their H-1B replacements, then shown the door. Salaries suppressed. Careers derailed. Trust shattered.
And the workers themselves? They were trapped too. Bound to a single employer, at risk of deportation if they lost their job, with little leverage to demand better pay or working conditions.
This wasn’t a talent pipeline. It was a wage-control mechanism wrapped in immigration paperwork.
The White House Finally Called It Out
Trump’s proclamation didn’t come out of nowhere. The White House fact sheet pulled no punches:
The share of IT workers on H-1B visas rose from 32% in 2003 to over 65% today.
Unemployment among recent U.S. computer science grads is now 6–7%, double that of biology or art history majors.
Between 2000 and 2019, the number of foreign STEM workers in the U.S. more than doubled, while STEM jobs overall grew only 44%.
And then the bombshell statistics:
One company received 5,189 H-1Bs in 2025 while laying off 16,000 Americans.
Another won 1,698 visas while cutting 2,400 jobs in Oregon.
A third slashed its U.S. headcount by 27,000 since 2022 while collecting over 25,000 H-1Bs.
Yet another cut 1,000 American jobs this February even as it brought in more than 1,100 H-1Bs.
This wasn’t anecdotal abuse. It was systemic. And it gutted any moral legitimacy the program once had.
Who Benefited?
The beneficiaries were obvious.
By nationality, over 70% of all H-1Bs went to Indian citizens. China accounted for another 10–15%. The rest of the world — including Europe — barely made a dent. For all the talk of “global talent,” the program was essentially a pipeline between the U.S. and India.
By company, the picture was just as clear. In 2024 alone:
Amazon – 9,300 approvals
Infosys – 8,100
Cognizant – 6,300
Google – 5,400
Tata Consultancy Services – 5,300
Meta – 4,800
Microsoft – 4,700
Apple – 3,900
That’s nearly 50,000 visas for just eight firms — more than half of the annual quota. The idea that H-1B was about startups desperately trying to hire a rarefied genius is laughable. It was about industrial-scale labor supply chains.
My Story: Remote Since 1999
This is where my personal story collides with the headlines. Because unlike those firms, I discovered more than twenty-five years ago that you don’t need to import workers to build global teams.
I started hiring remote in 1999. Back then, it was clunky. Slow internet. Different time zones. Payments wired through systems that barely worked. But I persevered, because I saw the potential.
I built teams in Eastern Europe and Asia. Armenia. Ukraine. Pakistan. India. North Macedonia. Hungary. Serbia. Thailand. And, most importantly for me, the Philippines.
Even today, my offshore team is ten to twenty times larger than my onshore staff. These aren’t short-term contractors. Many of them have been with me for five or ten years. They are loyal, skilled, and integral to everything I do.
Why I Never Moved Them to the U.S.
And here’s the crucial point: not once did I ever consider bringing them to America on an H-1B.
Why would I? That would destroy the very competitive advantage I’ve spent decades building.
In their home countries, the salaries I pay them translate into a high standard of living. They buy homes. They raise families. They live better than most of their peers. If I uprooted them to California or Texas, they’d be just another worker struggling with U.S. rent, U.S. taxes, U.S. healthcare. The edge would vanish.
And they don’t want it either. They like their lives. They like visiting the U.S. when needed — and I make that happen. I bring them on visitor visas for two weeks, a month, sometimes even three months at a time. I tell them to bring their spouse. We work, we bond, we celebrate. Then they go home, richer in experience, still connected to their families and cultures.
It’s a win-win. They thrive. I thrive. And no one has to play immigration games.
A Team Without Borders
Over the years, I’ve employed software developers, data entry teams, client service managers, Google Ads specialists, AI researchers, accountants, lawyers, outreach staff — the full spectrum.
All remote.
All loyal.
All thriving.
The technology now makes it seamless: Slack, Zoom, GitHub, AI collaboration tools. But even before all that, the principle was the same: talent is everywhere, and borders are irrelevant.
That’s why H-1B always looked to me like a relic. A 1980s solution in a 2025 economy.
Trump’s Reset
With the $100,000 fee, Trump has done more than reform H-1B. He has effectively priced it out of existence. Small businesses won’t pay it. Outsourcing firms can’t pay it. Only Big Tech, for the occasional superstar hire, will bother.
And that’s fine. Because the old model was rotten. It was never about the “best and brightest.” It was about locking in cheap labor. Trump’s move forces companies to confront reality: if you want to benefit from global talent, build distributed teams, or use other visa categories that reward genuine investment and entrepreneurship.
The Shifting Tech Landscape
To really understand why H-1B has lost its place in our times, you have to look at what has happened to the U.S. tech sector itself.
The last five years have been a perfect storm:
Over-hiring during COVID. Tech giants went on a hiring spree in 2020–2022, believing the world had shifted permanently online. When demand normalized, tens of thousands of engineers, product managers, and recruiters were laid off.
AI disruption. Large swaths of coding, data entry, even content production are now being automated. Entire categories of jobs are evaporating faster than universities can train graduates.
Too many graduates, not enough roles. Computer science programs have ballooned, but the job market is saturated. Unemployment among recent CS graduates is now higher than in many non-STEM fields.
Remote culture since COVID. Once the taboo was broken, companies realized: if half your team can work from home in Seattle, why can’t the other half work from home in Bangalore or Manila? For collaboration, it makes no difference.
Put it all together and the paradox is clear. On the one hand, H-1B feels like an artifact of another era — the days when Silicon Valley truly believed it needed to import armies of engineers to stay ahead. On the other hand, you have to ask whether Indian H-1B holders were ever the real “problem” for American tech workers. AI, over-hiring, and a global shift to remote work may pose far bigger challenges to the next generation of U.S. graduates than any visa policy.
What Happens Next: Consequences of the $100,000 H-1B Fee
The obvious question is: now that H-1B is effectively dead, will U.S. companies suddenly start hiring Americans for all those roles? The answer is: unlikely.
The economics don’t change just because a visa program collapses. If companies were replacing American staff with H-1B workers yesterday, they will simply replace them with offshore remote staff tomorrow. The incentives point in that direction, not toward a sudden surge of high-paid domestic hiring.
What is far more likely is that U.S. firms will accelerate what I have been doing for decades: building distributed teams overseas. For coding, data services, digital marketing, AI research, design, accounting, legal support — the tools exist to collaborate remotely at scale. If you can pay a skilled developer in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia a salary that gives them a great lifestyle at home, why pay three times more to hire in Silicon Valley?
Other consequences are just as clear:
Boom for nearshore hubs. Canada, Mexico, and Latin America will continue to attract U.S. companies seeking time-zone-aligned teams without the visa hassle. Toronto and Guadalajara have already become magnets for frustrated H-1B hopefuls.
Growth of employer-of-record platforms. Services like Deel, Remote.com, and Papaya will expand as companies realize they can legally payroll workers in 100+ countries without setting up local entities.
Pressure on U.S. universities. For years, the dream of H-1B kept international students enrolling at American schools despite sky-high tuition. With that dream gone, many will think twice before spending $200,000 on a U.S. degree if the reward is just three years of OPT and then a forced exit.
Innovation goes borderless. The myth that you must sit in a Bay Area office to build the next big thing is collapsing. AI startups, blockchain ventures, and fintech platforms can and will emerge anywhere. Talent no longer has to migrate; capital and projects will find it where it already lives.
Trump’s move doesn’t bring jobs back to American workers. What it really does is push companies to embrace the same borderless model I’ve practiced since 1999. In a sense, Washington has just accelerated the inevitable.
The Future of Talent
So when people ask me what I think about the “end of H-1B,” I say this: for me it ended before it began.
I never needed H-1B. I had Armenia, Ukraine, Pakistan, India, North Macedonia, Hungary, Serbia, Thailand, the Philippines. I had people who stayed with me for a decade because I treated them fairly, paid them well, and never tried to uproot them.
And the truth is, that’s where the world is heading. Distributed. Remote. Borderless.
Trump’s proclamation doesn’t kill the future. It simply acknowledges the past is gone.
Conclusion
The H-1B program died not because of Trump’s fee, but because it was already obsolete. Remote work made it unnecessary. Abuse made it indefensible. And politics made it unsustainable.
The future belongs to those who understand what I learned in 1999: the best teams are built on trust, not visas.
