“a new annual fee of $100,000 will be levied on each H-1B visa applicant going forward, which will serve as a big deterrent. Some number of the roughly 500,000 people currently in the U.S. with H-1Bs—high-skill visas used by tech workers, medical workers, and other professionals working in the fields they received degrees in—would have been dissuaded from coming here had the new system been in place. For companies hiring new talent, this fee will be a huge barrier to sponsoring foreign workers—which appears to be the point.
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Companies in many industries will probably respond to this shift by offshoring more of their workforces or relying on contract workers. (For the medical industry, this won’t really work. Bigger shortages might just become a fact of life.)”