GoKawiilLast fall, President Donald Trump’s executive order raising the fee for H-1B visas to $100,000 — like many of his immigration policies — led to near-immediate chaos. Thousands of workers who had flown overseas to renew their visas ended up stranded abroad. Details about who would be affected only emerged after the fact. Six months later, the disorder from the initial announcement has mostly subsided. The H-1B registration season for the next fiscal year has just begun. With H-1B applications open until March 19th, it’s unclear what effect, if any, the new rules will have on hiring, immigration, and the workforce, but experts are warning the effects will reverberate far beyond the tech industry.
Trump’s transition team was divided between a nativist bloc led by longtime adviser Stephen Miller and the president’s powerful new tech allies, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy chief among them. These factions were split on the subject of H-1B visas, which let skilled foreign workers come to the US to fill specific jobs. The visa category is most commonly associated with Big Tech, and for good reason: Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are the three biggest employers of H-1B workers. Musk’s ouster and the dissolution of his Department of Government Efficiency were the death knell for the tech-MAGA alliance, setting the stage for the H-1B fee hike.
But while H-1Bs might bring to mind lucrative software engineering jobs, the policy change has affected other industries more drastically. In fact, firms like Amazon can easily absorb the cost of the increased fees and have figured out workarounds to paying it. Instead, the H-1B fee increase is disproportionately affecting rural schools and hospitals already plagued by labor shortages. Put simply, Trump’s attempt to punish Big Tech is actually hurting underfunded schools and hospitals, many of them in deep-red rural districts that supported his candidacy.
There are two major changes: the fee hike, which generated the most attention, and a new prioritization system that favors high-earning applicants. Since there are more petitioners than there are open slots, H-1B visas are issued by lottery. But now, new applications will be weighted by income, and those with higher-paying jobs will have better odds of getting a visa. Applicants will now be divided into four wage levels: Those at Level 1 will be entered into the lottery one time, while those at Level 4 receive four entries. Immigration attorneys say that under this system, a tech worker earning a high salary would likely be prioritized over a teacher who earns less money. US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that handles H-1B and other visa applications, did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Margaret Stock, an Anchorage-based immigration lawyer, says the fee increase is already affecting public schools in her state. “We have a big labor shortage in Alaska,” she said, and that shortage extends to the school system. Stock represents several school districts that have hired foreign teachers on H-1B visas. The teachers, Stock said, are hired under union contracts that determine their salaries.
Partly because teachers are so hard to come by, Alaska is one of the highest-paying states for teachers. Some counties even offer signing bonuses and moving allowances. But these resources can only go so far. “The state doesn’t have the money to pay $100,000 per teacher for an H-1B worker,” Stock said. “It would be millions of dollars they’d be paying the federal government for teachers.”
Alaska has nearly 600 international teachers, 341 of whom are on H-1B visas, according to the Alaska Council of School Administrators. That’s a tiny percentage of the total H-1B workforce — per Pew, 400,000 applications were approved in 2024, the majority of which were renewals — but makes a huge difference in Alaska, the most sparsely populated US state. Alaska’s international teachers largely come from the Philippines, Ghana, and India — countries with large English-speaking populations. Last year, before the fee hike, the Nome, Bering Strait, and Kenai Peninsula school districts even organized a recruiting trip to the Philippines.
Stock said the fee increase won’t just affect prospective immigrants.
“Alaska is losing population, and one of the reasons we’re losing population is because people don’t want to live here when they can’t put their kids in a good school,” she said. “If the class sizes are too big, or there are no teachers, or there’s no activities, or there’s no healthcare, then people won’t want to live here. It’s not just an H-1B issue. There’s downstream effects on the whole economy.”
State and federal officials are hoping to receive exemptions for the fee increase. After the fee increase was announced, the administration clarified that the Department of Homeland Security will grant exceptions in “extraordinarily rare” circumstances where hiring foreign workers “is in the national interest,” and only when American workers aren’t available to fill those roles. Exemptions will only be granted in cases where the employer’s inability to pay “would significantly undermine the interests of the United States.”
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