Trump's 100K Fee Hike for High-Tech H-1B Visas Is Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Corrupt
The Trump administration keeps producing layered cakes of executive abuse, with one form of abuse on top of another, all the way down.
A new executive order imposes a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas issued to high-skilled foreign workers. But Trump has no legal authority to impose this fee. As
notes, “except for specific statutory fees, the only basis for the government to issue fees is to recover costs of adjudicating applications.”You can see this lawlessness in the chaos with which the change is being implemented. No one knows quite what it means because the only basis for the new fee is the arbitrary diktat of the president—yet his executive order was far from clear on the details.
According to a New York Times report:
Bernhard Mueller, co-chair of the immigration practice group at Ogletree Deakins, said he had been flooded with calls from executives and corporate board members about the new rules and how to communicate with employees about them. “There’s a lot of question marks all over this,” he said early Saturday. “We are still flying in somewhat foggy conditions.”
Moreover, this arbitrarily imposed fee serves as a way for the administration to raise revenue without any approval from Congress, as Politico notes in passing:
The fee hike for H-1Bs comes just months after the GOP’s sweeping policy and tax legislation raised fees for asylum applications, work permits, and humanitarian protections, part of an effort to curtail the number of undocumented immigrants able to apply for legal pathways. But it was also a way to raise revenue for the administration’s other priorities, including detention expansion, border wall construction, and the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents.
Last but not least, the new policy seems to allow Trump to make arbitrary and ad hoc exceptions. According to Science, “The order allows the government to waive the new fee for employees working ‘in the national interest.’” This gives Trump a new club to hold over the heads of tech companies—and universities.
The government holds a lottery to award up to 85,000 H-1B visas annually. However, universities and other nonprofit organizations are exempt from that cap, and elite research universities may employ as many as 200 or more faculty members and other science, technology, engineering, and math workers under the program. But the new fee, which applies to any application submitted after 21 September, could end that practice.
This is part of a wider pattern of Trump asserting completely arbitrary power over the American economy, by making more businesses and institutions dependent on his personal favor, with the end-goal of consolidating his own power.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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