President Donald Trump’s promised $100,000 fee for importing H-1B workers next year will be a trivial fee for Silicon Valley companies, says the Iran-born CEO of a recruiting company.
“$100k is a rounding error compared to the value each member of our team creates,” said Shahriar Tajbakhsh, CEO of MetaviewAI, which sells software to help automate job interviews. The company also hires workers in India.
“make it per day,” he taunted later. “i’ll set up a recurring payment.”
“That’s the arrogance,” responded Hany Girgis, the chairman of Skillstorm, a company that trains Americans for jobs. He added:
This is how lightly they take a $100K visa fee. That’s the message to American grads. And people still wonder why there’s a backlash.
Each year, employers use the H-1B program to import almost 120,000 mixed-skill workers, mostly for the entry-level professional jobs sought by young STEM graduates. The employers prefer to hire young foreign workers because they accept much lower pay, subordinate themselves to supervisors, and pay kickbacks to networks of job-selling managers in the hope of getting U.S. citizenship.
President Donald Trump’s support among young Americans has crashed as he zig-zags between supporting and opposing employers’ use of foreign workers in agriculture, seasonal sectors, foreign investment, and white-collar outsourcing.
In September, for example, Trump revealed that 2.5 million white-collar foreign workers — not immigrants — hold “STEM” jobs sought by Americans and also imposed a $100,000 fee on the arrival of some H-1B workers for 2026.
Since then, his deputies at the Department of Labor have begun investigations into the endemic fraud throughout the sector. An official at the Department of State promised to check the online history of H-1B candidates, and the Department of Homeland Security is drafting rules to reduce the share of lower-skilled migrants that arrive each year.
But so far, Trump’s measures have had minimal impact on the flow of visa workers into U.S. jobs — although he has angered the Indian-dominated visa-worker industry in the United States.
For example, Sheela Murthy, a top lawyer who works for a major group of Indian-run companies recently ranted against President Trump, saying, “Kick the butt of Donald Trump. Kick his ass, really. Let’s face it, kick him. Twice,” she said at a Seattle, Washington, meeting of the Indian-dominated ITServe Alliance.
Murthy, an Indian-American immigration attorney who has worked closely with ITServe, is the founder of the Murthy Law Firm, based in Maryland.
“While some speakers may express different views, they do not represent our organization… and do not represent our leadership’s views,” said a subsequent press statement from the group. “We stand with President Trump and his administration in stopping illegal immigration and reforming the system with merit-based solutions.”
The ITServe alliance has successfully lobbied both Democrats and Republicans for lower wages and more Indian workers since President Barack Obama’s administration. The group is now backing a draft by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) that would dramatically accelerate the inflow of visa workers into the jobs needed by American graduates.
The group also works with India’s national and state governments to maintain a rising supply of workers from India, especially from the state of Telangana.
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