GoKawiilOver the last 21 months, the U.S. federal government has created a series of high-profile barriers to legal immigration by highly-skilled students and workers: Cancelling visa extensions, cutting interview opportunities, and attempting to charge US $100,000 or more for certain immigrant visas.
“Whether they go into effect or not, it’s really an unrelenting barrage of government-sponsored propaganda against highly-skilled workers in the U.S.,” says former congressional immigration policy advisor David Bier, now an immigration scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The effect is that U.S. tech companies are adapting their search for top talent in part by both building offices and hiring workers abroad to get around the onslaught of new rules. And they’re doing so without wanting to talk about it: IEEE Spectrum contacted 25 U.S. tech companies to learn how they were adapting to the shifting environment. All of them either did not respond to a request to comment or declined to participate in this story.
New H-1B Rules Create Uncertainty, Impose Costs
By July 2025, the new U.S. presidential administration tightened visa interview requirements and imposed social media checks on new visa holders, and international students were already showing less interest in studying in the U.S., which IEEE Spectrum reported at the time.
Then, in September 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed a $100,000 tax on applications for new H-1B visas, up from around $5,000. H-1B visas allow certain skilled workers to temporarily live and work in the U.S. and serve as a common bridge to permanent residency. One category, for workers at universities, hospitals, and other non-profit institutions, is uncapped, but for-profit companies together can only hire up to 85,000 H-1B workers a year across the U.S., assigned through an annual lottery.
Tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Walmart advised some of their visa-holding employees not to travel abroad for fear of having trouble re-entering the country. They also lobbied the federal government, which narrowed the proclamation to applications from outside the U.S. Most applications for H-1B visas are by companies trying to hire foreign workers already in the U.S. with a different legal status.
In fact, most companies that might have hired H-1B workers decided against applying for visas for candidates subject to the $100,000 tax, a March court filing revealed. DHS recorded collecting fees for only 85 qualifying H-1B applications between the presidential proclamation in September 2025 and 15 February 2026. The department also reported processing 87 percent fewer applications for the H-1B visas subject to the tax than the year before. The government ended up earning $20 million less than the previous year on H-1Bs, because so few companies were willing to pay the new price for hiring H-1B workers from abroad.
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