JD Vance backs proposed new H-1B fee: Companies should ‘hire and train Americans’

Vice President JD Vance has thrown his weight behind a proposed $103,265 fee for employers filing cap-subject H-1B petitions.

In a 67-page filing on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed the fee, less than three months after a federal judge struck down the administration’s earlier $100,000 H-1B payment requirement.

The H-1B is a visa classification that allows US employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations, such as tech and finance.

Sharing The Wall Street Journal’s X post about the proposed fee, Vance wrote on Monday: “If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans.” The post had been viewed more than 2 million times as of press time.

If finalized, the fee would apply to all cap-subject H-1B petitions.

It would not apply to cap-exempt H-1B petitions, which include foreign workers employed by nonprofit or governmental research organizations or educational institutions.

The annual revenue collected from these petitions, which the DHS projected in its filing to be about $8.8 billion, would support immigration-related activities across several federal agencies, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Justice Department’s immigration courts, the State Department, and the Labor Department.

DHS said in the filing that H-1B petitioners — companies that file for the visa on behalf of their foreign employees — are “willing and able” to pay an additional fee.

It also said that if the new fee were imposed, US employers would be less likely to hire an H-1B worker over a “qualified and highly-skilled American worker” unless they have “no alternative for obtaining the specialized skills of the employee.” This is the latest effort from the Trump administration to reshape the path foreign workers take to work in the US.

Last September, the Trump administration announced it would impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, a move that sparked confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in the country.

But in June, a federal judge in the US District Court for Massachusetts ruled the move unlawful and struck it down.

The administration is also straining the student-to-skilled-worker pipeline.

In July, DHS finalized a rule limiting the initial admission period for international students on F-1 visas to four years.