A $100,000 H-1B fee was paid on 85 applications in five months

DHS collected the $100,000 fee on 85 H-1B applications between the September 2025 proclamation and 15 February 2026, according to a March court filing ^[4]. The same filing records an 87 percent drop in processing of applications subject to the fee compared with the year before ^[5], and about $28 million less in H-1B revenue than the previous year ^[6].

That last figure is the closest thing here to a natural experiment. A fee set high enough that almost nobody pays it does not raise money; it changes behaviour. The revenue went down while the price went up.

The filing does not say where those jobs went. IEEE Spectrum reports that U.S. tech companies are adapting in part by building offices and hiring abroad ^[2]. It does not count relocated positions. Julia Gelatt, a sociologist at the Migration Policy Institute, offered the range of possibilities: "Some of those jobs might just be relocated abroad, or maybe companies will make more efforts to recruit U.S. workers," she said, adding that some workers may have switched to L-1 transfers or O-1 visas for extraordinary ability ^[8]. Offshoring, domestic substitution, and visa substitution all produce the same 87 percent decline. Distinguishing them needs employment data the filing does not contain.

The silence is a data point of a different kind. All 25 U.S. tech companies IEEE Spectrum contacted either did not respond or declined to participate ^[3]. That is consistent with firms quietly relocating work. It is also consistent with legal caution about an order still being litigated, and with companies whose visa-holding employees were already being told not to travel abroad ^[9].

For scale: the for-profit H-1B cap is 85,000 workers a year, allocated by lottery ^[11]. The 85 fee-paying applications amount to roughly one tenth of one percent of that ceiling ^[12]. Two days after the proclamation the government narrowed it to applications filed from outside the U.S., which had been less than half of the previous year's applications ^[10], so the fee never applied to the whole pipeline in the first place.

Student visas feed those applications, and that change comes with a published cost estimate. In July the government set a fixed four-year limit on student visas, replacing a term that ran as long as the course of study ^[13], and is studying charging students between $70,000 and $100,000 to stay one to three years after graduation, which is currently free ^[14]. Michael A. Clemens of Johns Hopkins estimates the time-limit proposal alone could cost U.S. universities between hundreds of millions and several billion dollars a year ^[15]. That paper is a discussion paper and has not been peer reviewed ^[16].

David Bier, a former congressional immigration policy advisor now at the Cato Institute, put the cumulative effect this way: "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." ^[7]

I would treat the collapse in fee-paying applications as solid and the offshoring story as plausible but unquantified. The first is a government count. The second rests on trade reporting plus twenty-five companies that would not say.