Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
The proposed H-1B fee exceeds a year of pay for a $75,000 research job
Business Insider's year-later series on the H-1B crackdown opens with a Northwestern graduate who left Chicago for Germany after her employer said it could not sponsor her visa. The sponsorship call was the employer's.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Ananya Joshi left Chicago for a job in Germany in January, after the lab-grown meat startup that paid her $75,000 a year as a scientist told her it could not sponsor an H-1B visa.
- President Trump signed an order on September 20, 2025 charging companies $100,000 for each H-1B application and barring H-1B workers abroad from returning unless their employer paid, effective the next day.
- Amazon, Microsoft, JPMorgan and Meta issued urgent travel guidance to their H-1B employees after the $100,000 rule was introduced.
- US Citizenship and Immigration Services received nearly 344,000 eligible registrations for fiscal 2026, against the 85,000 new H-1B visas the country issues each year.
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Why it matters
- cost The charge falls on the employer for each hire, so the roles cut first are the ones where six figures of fees cannot sit inside the budget: junior lab and engineering jobs at companies with no immigration line item.
- decision Whether an international graduate stays is settled in an employer's finance review before the candidate weighs anything, so recruiting and retention pitches aimed at the candidate arrive after the decision is made.
- exposure A visa holder's family flight became a re-entry question one day after an order was signed, and the employer is the party that has to answer it.
- precedent A fee removed by a court came back as a proposal at a slightly higher number, so an employer budgeting sponsorship into fiscal 2027 has to treat the six-figure level as its working assumption.
Sponsorship is charged per hire, and for a junior research role the proposed charge is now bigger than the pay. The fee the administration put forward in August comes to about 1.4 times a year of the $75,000 salary Ananya Joshi was paid as a scientist at a lab-grown meat startup [2] [1]. Fees of this kind are billed to the employer: the order signed in September 2025 required companies to pay for each application [10]. A lab with one opening would spend more on the filing than on the researcher's first year.
The employer is also buying a lottery ticket. In fiscal 2026 there was roughly one selection available for every four eligible registrations [1]. About 700,000 people live and work in the US on H-1B visas, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy [5].
Joshi came from India for a master's in biotechnology at Northwestern and took the startup job in 2024 [1]. Her company told her it could not sponsor an H-1B, and her student work authorization, the OPT, was due to expire in July 2025 [2]. That left two options: the German offer, or a scramble to find another employer to file for her. She took the offer and moved in January [3]. "Having gone through so much turbulence, I really needed the stability to calm down," Joshi, 26, told Business Insider [4].
People already holding the visa were hit in their travel plans. Sonu, an Indian national who has had an H-1B since 2019 and works at a Silicon Valley company, was flying to New Delhi with his wife and infant daughter on September 20, 2025 when a friend in the US called at 7 a.m. to warn him about the order signed that day [9] [10]. "But I was with my family, and I couldn't risk it," he said [12]. He spent more than $7,000 on tickets for the earliest flight back to San Francisco, and about 24 hours later, on landing, learned the White House had limited the fee to new applicants [11] [13].
A federal judge struck the $100,000 fee down in June, nine months after it was signed [15]. The August proposal of $103,265 for most new H-1B petitions sits about 3 percent above the figure the court removed [16] [3].
The administration's position is that the domestic supply is adequate. "There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force," White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told Business Insider earlier this month [17]. The administration has said its changes are intended to curb misuse of the H-1B program and to protect American workers from being displaced by lower-paid foreign labor [18]. Registration volume does not settle that argument, because it counts the employers who wanted the visa and not the domestic candidates available to those employers [7].
The evidence for a thinning pipeline is one person's move, so far. Business Insider interviewed more than 20 international graduates and foreign workers over the past year, and this first weekly installment follows one relocation without reporting how many of the others have left [19] [4].
What to watch
- Whether the $103,265 proposal is finalised, and whether it attaches to registrations or only to petitions filed after a selection.
- The fiscal 2027 registration count: a fall from this year's total would be the first measured sign that employers are filing less.
- Later installments of Business Insider's series, and whether they report how many of the 20-plus workers interviewed have left the US.