British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is exploring proposals to abolish some visa fees for top global talent at a time when the US has taken a tougher stance on immigration, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Starmer's "global talent task force" is working on ideas to lure to the UK the world's best scientists, academics and digital experts, seeking to boost economic growth, the report said.
The Treasury department and Downing Street did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.
US President Donald Trump said his country would impose a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas from Sunday, in line with a wide-ranging immigration crackdown.
The H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities cannot be found. But immigration hard-liners and far-right activists have long argued that the visa allows companies to replace American workers with foreign ones. The issue has divided even Trump’s supporters, and the president’s stance on the program has shifted over time.
Before the new proclamation’s signing in the Oval Office on Friday, Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, laid out the rationale for the fee that the administration is attaching to what he called the “most abused visa," reported The New York Times.
“The whole idea is, no more will these big tech companies or other companies train foreign workers,” Lutnick said. “They have to pay the government $100,000, then they have to pay the employee — so it’s just not economic. If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land.”
The fee is likely to face legal challenges. It was slated to go into effect Sunday and will only be required for new applicants, according to a memo Saturday from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Who are the workers under the program?
Congress makes 65,000 H-1B visas available each year for workers with a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent, and 20,000 more for those with a master’s degree or higher. Universities and research organizations are exempt from those caps, The New York Times reported.
Many of the workers who have received the visas are software engineers, computer programmers and others in the technology industry. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and IBM were among the companies that employed the most H-1B visa holders last year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But many do work in other professions, including education, health care and manufacturing.
There is no cap for each country, and a vast majority of recipients come from India.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs emphasized the ties between the two nations in a Facebook post on Saturday and expressed concern that the abrupt changes could have “humanitarian consequences” for families. Many H-1B visa holders bring their spouses and children with them to the United States, where they can live together for decades on dependent visas.
Do H-1B holders replace American workers?
To obtain an H-1B visa, employers that are, in the government’s words, “H-1B dependent” must recruit domestic candidates first. Employers are required to pay H-1B workers at least as much as the “actual wage” of similar workers, or the “prevailing wage,” which the government defines as “the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation,” according to The New York Times report.
There have been episodes in which the program has been used to bring immigrants for jobs that American workers had held. In 2015, about 250 technology workers at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida, were told that they were being laid off, and that they would have to train their replacements — H-1B visa holders who had been brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Similar episodes that year affected employees of Toys “R” Us and the New York Life Insurance Co.
The program requires employers to pay H-1B workers, at a minimum, either the average wage for the job and the city where it is based, or the average wage of U.S.-born workers doing the same job. Companies are prohibited from paying H-1B workers less than other workers with similar skills and qualifications. Still, about 60% of the positions paid “well below” the local median wage for the occupation in 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which cited the Labor Department’s “broad discretion” to set H-1B wage levels.