Trump administration last Friday Announced A new $ 100,000 annual levy on H -1B visa, allowing 85,000 skilled foreign workers to enter the US every year. This fee is applied to companies that hire these workers, mainly in technology.
This is not the veteran enterprise capitalist Michael Moritz. In a new, scary Financial Times OddFormer Sequoia Capital Honcho compared the White House to Tony Soprano’s Pork Store, this step is called another “cruel forced plan”.
Moritz argues that Trump fundamentally misunderstood why tech companies hire foreign workers, saying that it is about filling skills and shortage of labor, does not replace Americans or cuts the cost. The policy will backfire, he warns, instead of pushing the companies to move the work instead of working to Istanbul, Warsaw or Bangalore, instead of placing it to the states.
Moritz writes, “Engineers with degrees bachelor’s degrees from better Eastern Europe, Türkiye and Indian universities are also qualified as their American counterparts.”
Instead of restricting the H -1B visa, Moritz suggested them to double or triple, or automatically provide citizenship to foreign nationals earning STEM PhD from top American universities. He indicates CEOs of foreign-born CEOs such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s beautiful Pichai as an example of the success of the H-1B program. (Elon Musk and Instagram co-founder Mike Criegger Two others,
Moritz received himself a precursor visa for H -1B in 1979, and since then, the billionaire writes, “I have felt grateful to the country that welcomed me.”
