How Trump’s $100K price tag for H-1B work visas could impact Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware

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About 20 years ago, when Veenu Aishwarya was in college in India, he got inspired by the Nobel Prize in medicine, which went to scientists who had figured out how to turn specific genes off.

“If you have the power to turn off a gene, I think that’s just amazing,” he said. “It still gives me goosebumps because this is an extremely important way to figure out … a disease.”

He later came to the U.S. to work at a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he built two small biotechnology companies based on gene silencing technology. His companies have fewer than 10 workers total, but sell their products to researchers and scientists in multiple countries.

This year, Aishwarya decided to hire his first overseas worker — a Ukrainian scientist with a medical degree who had already worked at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He applied for an H-1B work visa on her behalf. But they did not win the visa lottery, which is how the government determines which applications move forward due to overwhelming demand for these visas.

Recently, President Donald Trump proclaimed that the U.S. will dramatically increase the price of H-1B visas to $100,000 per application.

“It will do one thing for sure — small companies like me, we won’t be able to apply,” Aishwarya said.

He added that he wants to bring the best people to grow his small businesses in the U.S.

“If you want to hire someone from outside, I think money should not be the deciding factor, it should be talent, because that’s what … makes America the greatest country,” he said. “If we can find a way to make this work, we will try our best to make this work.”

More than 10,000 workers in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey received H-1B visas in 2024 to work in the U.S., mostly for accounting and consulting firms, tech companies, universities and health care organizations, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. More than 580,000 workers in the U.S. held H-1B visas in fiscal year 2019, according to the most recent data available from USCIS.

Trump explained that he wanted a new $100,000 price because companies abuse the system by bringing people overseas to replace U.S. workers. However, there are existing laws to prevent that, said Jonathan Grode, an immigration lawyer based in Philadelphia and U.S. practice director and managing partner for the law firm Green and Spiegel.

Grode says that like with any system, there are bad actors who abuse it, but the Department of Labor can use existing rules to prevent that from happening. In the meantime, he said the president’s proclaimed price hike has just created chaos.

“The amount of calls, the amount of worried people, the amount of emergencies that we had to deal with, clients asking frankly if they should even charter planes to bring their staff back … that’s how worried people were about this provision,” Grode said. “So if the … wont of the government was to create pandemonium, they knocked it out of the park.”

Grode said he has already heard from a large client who had been working with him on H-1B applications and now thinks it is not worth it to even try.

He said the H-1B visa system could certainly use improvement, as politicians from both sides of the aisle have discussed it on and off over the years, but “this sort of draconian $100,000 fee … really came as a surprise.”

This price hike could drive talent away from the U.S., according to a statement from Compete America, a coalition that includes universities, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and large tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft. The coalition urged Trump to reconsider this proclamation because it would mean less investment in U.S. companies and more talent for overseas competitors.

The American Hospital Association said U.S. hospitals use H-1B visas to bring in skilled medical professionals, including to areas with shortages of health care workers.

If the price hike were to stand, it would impact universities, health care, manufacturing and many other sectors of the economy, said Matthew Hirsch, a longtime immigration lawyer in Philadelphia and partner at the law firm Solow, Hartnett and Galvan.

However, he said he would expect lawsuits over this, because while the president has a lot of authority over immigration policies, changing a rule or fee requires going through a formal rulemaking process.

“H-1B workers are in the United States not because they cost less; they’re not in the United States not because they’re easier to employ … actually, it’s a significant cost to an employer,” Hirsch said. “They’re in the United States because they are meeting a need and they are serving the need of U.S. employers, U.S. consumers, U.S. families.”