DHS imposes $103,265 fee on H-1B visas months after court struck down similar charge

A six-figure fee returns after a court loss

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it will impose a $103,265 fee on H-1B high-skilled work visas, The Verge reports. The move revives an effort a federal judge rejected in June, when the administration's earlier $100,000 charge was struck down — though not before more than 70 employers had paid it.

The new figure is modestly higher than the version the court threw out, a signal that the administration intends to keep pressing the policy rather than abandon it after a legal defeat.

The hiring pipeline tech runs on

No industry leans on the H-1B more than technology. Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are the three largest employers of H-1B workers, according to The Verge. For companies of that scale, a six-figure charge is an annoyance; for nearly everyone else it behaves like a ban.

The earlier fee round made that divide clear. The Verge reports that the first charge deepened staffing shortages at rural hospitals and in Alaska's public schools, employers that have increasingly turned to high-skilled immigrant workers as local populations decline. What was a budget line for a tech giant proved ruinous for institutions already struggling to attract qualified candidates.

Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us — an immigration advocacy group founded in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives — called the new fee "clearly unlawful" and said its purpose is not subtle: eliminating the H-1B and OPT programs outright. "Companies will be started elsewhere, people will be hired elsewhere," he told The Verge.

OPT looks like the next target

DHS has also hinted that Optional Practical Training could carry a $100,000 fee of its own, according to The Verge. OPT lets international students work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for some STEM students and additional extensions for holders of certain graduate degrees. Advocates and business leaders are treating the signal as a preview of the next fight.

A same-day crackdown on asylum seekers

The fee was half of a one-day policy blitz. The Associated Press reported that the State Department plans to rescind up to 200,000 business and travel visas issued between 2016 and 2026 to people who applied for asylum after arriving in the United States, which the AP said would be the largest mass visa revocation in US history. State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told the AP the department is coordinating with DHS to cancel visas held by people who arrived as short-term visitors and then filed asylum claims to stay permanently.

As The Verge points out, those applicants broke no law: asylum can only be requested from within the US, so arriving on a visa and applying afterward is the normal route, not an exploit. Schulte described the revocations as part of an "all-of-government approach," saying that "every single other pathway is harder, outlawed, eliminated, more bureaucratic, more difficult across the board."

Why it matters

If a six-figure fee survives the courts, the H-1B stops functioning as a routine hiring channel and becomes a privilege only the wealthiest employers can fund. Amazon and Meta can absorb the cost; startups, rural hospitals and school districts drawing from the same visa pipeline largely cannot. A matching OPT fee would compound the damage by cutting off the student-to-work transition that supplies much of the tech industry's talent. And because this is the administration's second attempt after a judge blocked the first, employers now face a moving target where skilled-immigration rules can flip with each ruling or press release. The most immediate consequence may be geographic: if the US prices out skilled workers, the companies that would have hired — or been founded by — them will simply form somewhere else.