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$3,800 Flights and Aborted Takeoffs: How Trump’s H-1B Announcement Panicked Tech Workers
President Trump’s sudden policy shift sent immigrant tech workers and firms scrambling to get back to the US and avoid $100,000 fees.
On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.” The news left Xiayun and hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers scrambling to figure out how they’d be impacted and whether, if they were abroad, they should return before Sunday, when the new rule was set to take effect. While explanations posted by the administration on Saturday afternoon clarified that most H-1B visa holders who were outside of the country at the time did not actually need to rush back, by then they claim they had already lost thousands of dollars in changing their travel plans and spent two days in emotional stress. “Creating pain and points of leverage against private organizations—which allows the administration to demand coercion and tribute—is in a very real way our entire non-AI economic agenda right now,” Derek Thompson, political thinker and co-author of the book Abundance, wrote on X.
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