Namibia’s revenge: The US shot itself in the foot when President Donald Trump’s administration hiked the cost of the visa that allows American employers to hire foreign workers, the writer says. Photo: Supplied
The price of a US H-1B visa is now $100 000, a steep increase from the previous cost of $3 000 to $5 000. President Donald Trump said he would end inflation, it would be the lowest inflation in history, no inflation would ever be as beautifully low. Oops! Not for every product, apparently.
The message is clear, newly re-engraved on New York Harbor’s Statue of Frivolity: “Give us your rich, your wealthy, your vibrant corporate executives with lawyers in their back pockets, your finance magicians, your modern pre-approved aristocrats, your one-percenters, your magnates yearning to expand their empires, your venture capitalists showered up from their teambuilding exercises, your gold-plated rococo dreamers and schemers, with full pockets and trust funds and signed contracts …”
I could go on. The point is, in America today, the lamp no longer burns for the weary. It blazes for those who can pay for the electricity — and a lot of it.
The H-1B programme has always been a bit of a paradox — one hand open for global talent diversity, the other a pounding fist that shuts out those who don’t qualify. But when every company could afford it, it seemed fairer.
It was never meant to be a velvet rope for millionaires. It was designed in 1990 to let companies bring in “specialty occupation” talent — engineers, researchers, doctors, professors — the people who helped build Silicon Valley’s backbone.
For decades, the costs were modest — a few thousand dollars in filing fees, legal costs and paperwork. Even universities, NGOs and small companies could afford to sponsor foreign talent. The idea was, if you had skills America needed, you could get in.
The programme issued 20 000 visas in its first year. By 2022, the number had quadrupled. Around 70% went to tech and research roles. These aren’t yacht owners; they’re the people keeping the labs, start-ups and hospitals running.
So, what will happen now?
A Senate aide I spoke to, who preferred to remain anonymous, put it succinctly: “Catastrophe.”
I find, as a rule of thumb, everything in New York costs about three times as much as in South Africa. So, for example, a Whopper meal in New York costs a whopping $16. The same in SA is about $6.
Adjusting for real costs and incomes, the new H-1B visa costs the equivalent of a third of a million
dollars for South Africans. Is Wits going to pay that for a professor? Afrika Tikkun for a trainee? Even corporates like Vodacom, Standard Bank and MTN?
Anyone from South Africa who can afford those fees probably doesn’t need to come to work in America in the first place.
Even from the other side, it becomes prohibitive. In fact, the hardest hit might be mid-tier American institutions themselves, who have long relied on affordable H-1B sponsorship to stay competitive. When the cost jumps twentyfold, they’ll simply stop hiring abroad.
A 2022 National Foundation for American Policy study found that 55% of US unicorn companies (319 of 582 at the time) were founded by immigrants. When including companies with at least one immigrant founder or key immigrant executive, the figure rises to 64%.
These immigrant-founded firms were collectively valued at $1.2 trillion and employed tens of thousands of people in the US.
You might have heard of a few of these. Google, co-founded by Russian Sergey Brin. Stripe, by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. Zoom, by Eric Yuan from China. And, of course, Tesla and SpaceX founded by one of our own (sort of), Mr Musk.
According to the National Science Foundation, more than half of US postdoctoral researchers in science and engineering are foreign-born.
In some fields (like computer science and maths), that figure is closer to 70%. Nearly 30% of US patents in recent years list at least one foreign-born inventor.
About a third of US physicians are foreign-trained, according to the American Medical Association. In rural areas, that share can climb to up to 40%, because foreign doctors are more willing to work in underserved communities than US-trained doctors.
Remember that group of Afrikaner farmers I talked about in a previous column? Under the new rule, to work in the US would have cost Solidarity, the group that organised that project, nearly $6 million. That’s a lot of Whoppers.
Side point — I promised to catch up on these refugees. And I must disappoint you a little. We do know that the group of 59 farmers who arrived at Dulles International Airport in May grew to 138 by early September.
But, as for where they are and what they are doing, I must sadly report my failure as a journalist to uncover the details. No online source is revealing the results of the immigration — as if they are all in the witness-protection programme.
Even Charl Kleinhaus, widely tagged by media houses like The New York Times and the BBC for his anti-Semitic posts, has disappeared from X entirely. Jaco Kleynhans of Solidariteit, supposedly their spokesperson, told me he has “nothing to say to someone from the Mail & Guardian”, and has not returned my calls and messages beyond that.
I thought spokespeople spoke to everyone. Guess I was mistaken. I’ll take it as being-unique flattery.
It’s not just South Africans, of course, who are impacted by the new policy. It’s everyone from any of Africa’s so-called s***hole countries.
Imagine a brilliant Kenyan AI engineer who can’t get her dream job at a start-up. Or a 27-year-old data scientist from Lagos unable to teach at Harvard. NGOs, mid-tier universities, small companies and hospitals won’t pay that kind of money for
foreign hires.
The talent pipeline that once ran both ways will now narrow to a trickle — one reserved for Fortune 500 firms and venture-backed darlings. America first, baby.
And today, that means rampant, high-impact capitalism. Because it’s more important to make more jobs for Americans, in this line of thought, than to get the best talent. Output, not input. Just like tariffs.
What we’re really watching is the quiet construction of a new border wall — not of steel, but of gold bricks.
Trump’s first wall was geographical. This one’s economic. It’s the same populist wrapping paper, but the present inside is different — a migration system designed not for national security or cultural identity, but for banking.
Other countries are rubbing their hands with glee at the opportunity. Canada has slashed visa processing times for skilled immigrants. Australia runs points-based systems to actively recruit talent. The EU is expanding its Blue Card scheme.
In the global competition for brains, the US is effectively tossing its decades-long advantage into the garbage. For talent, like water, flows to where the taps flow.
The Trump administration recently announced that next year it will only admit 7 500 refugees, down from the 125 000 in the last year of the Biden administration. That’s a slash of 95%. And, of these, several thousand may just be our whiteys. Are you proud of this? I am! We’ll take what they give us.
The new H-1B approach brings the same insane logic of so many Trump administration policies — the latest being that Tylenol causes autism.
It’s good to know we are safe from autism here in the good ol’ SA,
since we only have Grandpa, Calpol and Panado.
Since my previous column, the administration has cut out immigrants from Zimbabwe totally. Which means my fiancée can no longer get a new visa for America. When her H-1B visa runs out, I can only come back to South Africa to visit her.
It’s a little stressful, but hey, that’s how it works now in the land of the free where, “Welcome to America!” is no longer a universal greeting. It only applies to people, companies and countries with deep pockets.
Keep your tired, your poor, your brilliant, please. They’re someone else’s problem now. The Statue of Frivolity just installed an ATM. And it only takes platinum cards.
Michael Lee is the Mail & Guardian’s US correspondent and is based in New York.