By Pranav
Dixit, Ashley
Stewart, Hugh
Langley, Ben
Bergman, and Charles
Rollet
Sep 21, 2025, 2:51 PM PT
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Minutes after President Donald Trump signed his H-1B visa
executive order Friday evening, panic rippled through the cabin of an
India-bound Emirates flight about to take off from San Francisco.
As passengers' phones lit up with calls and emails about the
order, dozens of H-1B visa holders started walking off the plane one by one.
Each exit sent ground crew scrambling to dig through the hold for luggage. In
the cabin, tempers frayed. People whispered anxiously.
From her window seat, Zarna Joshi, a US citizen and
healthcare worker, watched as cart after cart of bags was hauled back away from
the aircraft. It was a nightmare, Joshi told Business Insider. "We'd
already been onboard for two hours, and there were no updates — just more
people leaving."
By Joshi's count, at least 40 passengers walked off the
plane. Some wavered, torn between long-awaited reunions and urgent company
emails. A Microsoft employee sitting near Joshi initially refused to get off,
saying that she hadn't been home to India for three years. A half hour later,
after receiving an email from Microsoft's immigration team, she stood up
silently, grabbed her things, and left the plane. Emirates declined to comment.
Trump's Friday
order said companies would need to pay a $100,000 fee for employees on
H-1B visas, a move that sent
shockwaves through Silicon Valley and much of corporate America. For
decades, the tech industry has leaned on H-1B visas to fill specialized roles
for engineering and research. Just weeks earlier, the country's most powerful
technology CEOs — Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's
Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Apple's Tim Cook — sat
around a White House dinner table, repeatedly thanking and praising
Trump, while he lauded their US investments.
Any goodwill from that dinner didn't last long. Hours after
the order, immigration and HR teams at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta,
Salesforce, JPMorgan, and Zoom blasted
out urgent warnings: don't leave the US if you're on an H-1B, and get
back within 24 hours if you're abroad. H-1B visa-holding employees were
scrambling for flights and flooding
legal teams with desperate questions. Lawyers scrapped their weekends
to field panicked calls, while thousands of workers vented online in group
chats and social media.
By Saturday, the White House tried to clarify
the situation: the fee applies only to new petitions, not renewals, and
visa holders won't be blocked from returning, it said. On Sunday, it also published an
FAQ about the order.
The administration cast the fee as a corrective. In
the executive
order, Trump said that the H-1B system had strayed from its original
purpose of filling high-skill shortages and was instead being
"deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American
workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor." He pointed to IT
outsourcing firms as egregious abusers, saying that they used the program to
undercut wages and push Americans out of jobs in critical fields like computer
science and engineering.
The H-1B program itself has long been a flashpoint in US
politics. Created in 1990, the visas allow American companies to
temporarily hire highly skilled foreign workers for jobs that
employers say can't be filled by US talent. Indian workers dominate the
program: in fiscal year 2024, more than 70 percent of approved H-1B petitions —
roughly 280,000 people — went to Indian nationals, according to USCIS data.
That dominance has fueled resentment in some corners of the
American workforce and, more recently, spurred cultural backlash. When Sriram
Krishnan, an Indian-born venture capitalist and a supporter of legal
immigration reform, was tapped for a prominent role in the Trump administration
in December 2024, he faced a torrent
of complaints that echoed long-running criticism of the visa program.
The order framed those grievances in stark terms. It
highlighted cases in which large US companies laid off thousands of Americans
while simultaneously hiring thousands of H-1B workers. Imposing a $100,000 fee,
the order concluded, was necessary to curb abuse, raise wages for American
workers, and ensure the program remained limited to what Trump called "the
best of the best."
Some in the tech industry cheered the move. Netflix
cofounder Reed Hastings posted on
X that the new fee was a "great solution" that would reserve H-1B
visas "just for very high value jobs."
Business Insider spoke to more than a dozen tech workers,
VCs, and immigration lawyers about how they were grappling with the uncertainty
and what they were planning to do next. Amid the frenzy, one thing seems to be
clear: the new rules mean hiring the foreign talent that companies have long
relied on is set to get far more expensive.
Big Tech's big Friday night mayhem
Akaash Hazarika's Toronto vacation ended with a Friday night
scramble for a $500 plane ticket back home to the States. The 29-year-old
Salesforce engineer cut his trip short and raced for a 6 a.m. flight back to
Bellevue, Wash. Hazarika had no choice. Salesforce had already emailed with a
warning: Get back to the US within 24 hours.
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tech giants that could be hit hardest by President Donald Trump's $100,000 H-1B
visa fees
"It was stressful," Hazarika told Business
Insider. "I didn't sleep all night. I kept thinking: What if I get stuck
outside the US?"
At Microsoft, which applied for more than 5,500 H-1B visas
in fiscal year 2024, the order triggered instant turmoil. "This is going
to rock our shit," one employee told Business Insider on the condition of
anonymity. "The number of H-1Bs we use is very high, and the number of
H-1Bs our partners and contractors use is also very high."
On Friday night, Microsoft sent out a warning to employees:
"Beginning at 12:01 a.m. eastern time on September 21, individuals will
not be able to enter/return to the U.S. in H-1B status unless their petition
has an additional $100,000 payment associated with it," the internal memo
viewed by Business Insider, states. It advised those already in the country to
"remain in the U.S. for the foreseeable future" and those abroad to
"do what you can" to return before the deadline.
"The Trump administration gave no real advance warning
on the proclamation, and so everyone is reacting together," a Microsoft
executive who wished to stay anonymous told Business Insider. "People are
shocked and confused. There's a lot of anxiety. A lot of people canceled travel
plans or rushed back."
Sherin Sunny, a senior software engineering manager at
Walmart, told
Business Insider that the 36 hours following Trump's order were filled
with panic and fear. He was constantly checking YouTube, LinkedIn, and the
White House official channels for clearer instructions.
Google's immigration lawyers also spent Friday night trying
to understand the order and alert employees that they were monitoring the
situation. Employees on H-1Bs who were in the US were advised to remain in the
US, while those outside of the country were told they should do their best to
re-enter the US by 12:01 a.m. on Sunday. In 2024, Google applied for nearly
5,500 H-1B visas for its employees, according to USCIS data.
"Departing the U.S. may result in complications or
denial of re-entry under the new policy," read an email to Googlers sent
by BAL, the company's immigration law firm. Googlers outside the country who
might not make it back by the deadline were told to alert someone via Google's
internal immigration portal. "We understand this may create challenges,
and we are here to support you," the memo added.
Meta warned employees on Friday night, in guidance viewed by
Business Insider, to reassess travel plans for the next 14 days or consider
returning to the US before the executive order takes effect.
Other companies, including Amazon, Zoom, JP Morgan, and many
others, sent similar
advisories to employees.
Google, Salesforce, and Meta declined to comment. Amazon did
not respond. A spokesperson for Microsoft said, "The clarifications from
the U.S. government yesterday were very helpful and much appreciated."
"Kneecaps startups'"
Big Tech might pay up, but startups could be priced out.
"I think Big Tech companies will probably take the path
of least resistance, which is just pay," Deedy
Das, a partner at VC firm Menlo Ventures, told Business Insider. "I
think it hurts startups the most."
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tech giants that could be hit hardest by President Donald Trump's $100,000 H-1B
visa fees
"A $100K annual fee won't bother Big Tech, but it
kneecaps startups and bodyshops the same, and that's a mistake," posted Y
Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan on X on Saturday. Early-stage teams, he
argued, simply can't swallow a tax that high.
Sophie Alcorn, founder of Alcorn Law in Palo Alto,
California, whose clients include venture capital firms and small startups,
said smaller companies and startups could be hit hard by the change if they
find the $100,000 tab prohibitive. By comparison, she said, Big Tech could
absorb the cost for some workers.
Menlo Ventures' Das said the math alone shows why startups
are most exposed. "An early-stage startup is probably not paying too much
more than like $150,000 to $200,000 for base salaries," he told Business
Insider. "So if you're looking at $150,000 to $200,000 and you say, hey,
let's tack on a $100,000 fee … it makes it a little bit harder for them to
hire."
David Hornik, a founding partner at Lobby Capital, said the
consequences go beyond balance sheets. "Any impediment to H-1B visas is a
detriment to the country and startups," he told Business Insider, noting
that the startup world relies heavily on the expertise of foreign citizens.
"If we're going to create an impediment to hiring the best possible
people, then we will be creating an impediment to creating the best possible
companies."
Hornik said hiring Americans has never been the issue.
Startups want the best candidates wherever they are. If US immigration rules
make it too difficult to bring those workers here, he said, young companies
will have no choice but to spread their teams across borders and hire talent
abroad instead of building in America, he said.
Large American tech companies have already been expanding
outside traditional hubs like the Bay Area and New York, and setting up offices
in Vancouver, Mexico City, and Bangalore. This order, insiders say, only gives
them more reason to accelerate those moves.
Das agrees that the Big Tech companies will continue to grow
offices in other parts of the world. "This is an additional incentive for
them to continue to accelerate that," he said.
Jason Finkelman, an immigration attorney from Austin who has
been advising companies on employment-based immigration for more than 15 years,
told Business Insider that the order is almost certain to be tested in court.
While presidents have broad leeway to issue executive orders, he said, charging
$100,000 for an H-1B petition has no clear basis in law. "The proclamation
says, in very general terms, it's to protect American jobs," he said.
"That's not enough."
He predicted lawsuits from employers ranging from one-person
startups to Big Tech companies. Even if the order is eventually overturned,
Finkelman warned, the signal it has already sent could leave lasting scars.
"The damage was done the moment it was announced,"
he said.
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