Jeremy Hsu
On September 19, President Donald Trump issued a presidential proclamation directing his administration to require a $100,000 payment from US employers for each H-1B application. That was followed on September 24 by a Department of Homeland Security proposal to change the H-1B selection process—currently a randomized lottery—by giving the equivalent of more lottery tickets to applicants who are assigned a higher wage level as defined by the federal government.
These proposals targeting H-1B visa applications used by American companies to employ foreign workers—overwhelmingly in the tech sector—threaten to undermine Trump’s own stated goal of ensuring US “global dominance” in harnessing artificial intelligence. Experts warn that the Administration’s attempted overhaul of the H-1B visa program could erode Silicon Valley’s advantage in attracting top-tier talent from around the world—even as other countries like China step up their AI research and talent recruitment game.
“The US’s singular advantage in the AI race has been its ability to draw the best minds from everywhere—turning international students into the founders and researchers of the world’s leading AI firms,” says Jeremy Neufeld, director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “China, meanwhile, is rolling out new talent pathways like the K visa and has set an explicit goal of rivaling US leadership by 2035. At the very moment competitors are doubling down, America risks walking away from its own edge.”
The proposed visa application changes would represent a seismic shift for tech companies, which dominate the top 10 ranking of US employers sponsoring H-1B visas. Amazon alone sponsored more than 14,000 approved H-1B visas in the first three quarters of this fiscal year, followed by Microsoft and Meta with more than 5,000 visas each, and then Apple and Google with more than 4,000 visas apiece. But the H-1B fee and proposed changes would be especially devastating for smaller AI startups that cannot afford such additional visa costs for recruiting foreign talent and makes it more challenging for international students graduating from American universities to get sponsors for legal employment in the United States. That threatens to throttle both the startups often responsible for the greatest innovations and Silicon Valley’s pipeline of young up-and-coming AI talent.
No comments:
Post a Comment