A new $100,000 fee on temporary visas for skilled foreign workers imposed by President Donald Trump could have a serious impact on North Texas’ economy, jeopardizing thousands of high-paying jobs, exacting an expensive toll on some of the region’s biggest companies and potentially curtailing the trajectory of some of its fastest-growing cities.
“I think it’s a big hit, because of the huge increase in labor costs to get the high-skilled workers that a growing economy needs,” said Dean Stansel, a professor at the SMU Cox School of Business. “If you’re going to make that more costly, you’re going to get less of it. So all of us equal, we’re going to be poorer, basically, than we would’ve been without this.”
Dallas-Fort Worth companies have been approved for 12,335 H-1B visas since 2009, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.
D-FW companies with the most H-1B applications approved this fiscal year include Richardson-based Infosys with 1,975, Charles Schwab with 433, AT&T with 374, Caterpillar with 208 and American Airlines with 178.
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Research and educational organizations, including the Dallas Independent School District, also use the program widely, while smaller companies, ranging from tech startups to law firms, rely on it to fill niche roles. And while megacompanies might be able to stomach the cost of the new fees, those without hundreds of millions of dollars on their balance sheets generally won’t, experts said.
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“For your middle-size, your smaller companies, this is going to be very difficult,” said Richard Gump, a Dallas-based immigration law attorney. “Many companies can be very dramatically affected by it, if they need the particular talent and it’s unavailable because of the pricing.
“It’s a kind of a tariff on visas, if you think of it that way.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for AT&T said the company was “evaluating the impact to our business” from the new fees. “As the largest private employer in the metroplex,” the statement added, “we have a very small percentage of positions that require highly specialized expertise for which we are unable to hire domestically.”
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A representative for the Dallas Regional Chamber, North Texas’ preeminent business group, did not respond to an inquiry from The Dallas Morning News.
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Under the decades-old H-1B program, which is meant to help U.S. companies find highly skilled foreign employees for difficult-to-fill jobs, 85,000 visas are available each year, although those granted to universities and other research organizations don’t count toward that figure.
The visa program has played an enormous role in buttressing the American tech sector, with many of the tens of thousands of H-1B permissions going to foreign software engineers, developers and other in-demand talent, and the majority of recipients coming from India, according to the Pew Research Center.
Locally, the $100,000 fee — if it sticks — would likely have a significant impact on D-FW’s rapidly emerging tech and finance sectors as well as its established health care industry, Stansel said.
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It would also dampen the regional economy more broadly: While the H-1B directly helps high-skilled — and typically highly paid — immigrant workers, those positions also help support a range of additional jobs, from restaurant workers to accountants.
“So when you cut that off,” Stansel said, “you’re really risking your future prosperity.”
The policy change came abruptly on Friday, when Trump issued a proclamation declaring that foreign workers must include the $100,000 payment with their H-1B applications, framing the shift as a measure to protect the American workforce and American wages, especially in the IT sector.
“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions,” the White House proclamation said, “but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”
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The president’s move, along with raising legal questions, sparked pandemonium in certain circles within the U.S. and abroad, as corporations and workers struggled to process the sudden policy change. Dozens of H-1B holders on a plane about to take off from San Francisco for India scrambled for the exits, fearful of jeopardizing their return trips to the United States, Business Insider reported.
The announcement comes amid the administration’s monthslong broader immigration crackdown. The H-1B visa changes prompted fierce criticism, including from India, where an external affairs minister warned in a statement that the policy was “likely to have humanitarian consequences.”
It also led to widespread confusion over what was happening, including whether existing visa holders would also be on the hook.
“The initial wording of the H-1B proclamation was extremely vague and imprecise and suggested that the new fee would apply to all H-1B visa holders outside the U.S. on the effective date, which then, of course, caused extreme chaos,” Dana DiRaimondo, a New York-based business immigration lawyer, told The News.
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Over the weekend, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on social media that the fee would only apply to new visas and not current visa holders or renewals.
But the magnitude of the shift still sent shockwaves throughout North Texas, especially prosperous, immigrant-heavy communities like Frisco, where a relatively large percentage of residents and their families have relied on the H-1B visa to make a successful life in the United States. Pallavi Ahluwalia, a local corporate immigration attorney, said her firm was quickly inundated with nearly 100 emails and calls.
“Absolute panic,” she told The News. “Absolute, full-blown panic. And I’d say that I’m hearing equally from [employers and] employees.”
Business editors Kyle Arnold and Javier David contributed reporting.
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