After announcing a new rate of $ 100,000 in H-1B visas, the Trump administration proposed on Tuesday to review the Lottery Selection process of the Visa to prioritize more paid and most qualified foreign employees.
The proposed policy changes could revive the debate on the use of foreign labor by US employers.
The measure occurs when President Donald Trump has signed up for H-1b Visas, a program widely used by large technology and subcontracting companies to hire foreign workers, announcing on Friday that companies should pay a $ 100,000 rate with new applications submitted after September 21.
The administration went on Tuesday to the assignment of H-1B visas, proposing a “weighted selection process” for when the annual demand of the visas heads the limit of 85,000 established by the Congress, which according to it has happened every year for more than a decade.
The new process would replace the current lottery system that determines who can request these limited visa points in favor of putting more weight on the highest and higher foreign workers with greater specialty, according to a proposed rule that will be published in the Federal Registry on Wednesday.
According to current lottery rules, offers to request an H-1B visa are randomly assigned.
The Trump administration proposal would assign the possible employees to four different salary bands, with the workers in the highest salary category by entering the selection group four times and those in the lower salaries category that are entered into the selection group once.
The National Security Department declared in the proposal that the weighted system would better serve the original intention of the VISA and “encourage employers to offer higher salaries or higher qualification positions to H-1B workers and discourage the widespread use of the H-1B program to fill lower or lower qualified positions.”
He said that the proposed selection process would still maintain opportunities for employers to hire H-1B workers at “all salary levels.”
‘A strong signal’
The H-1B Visa program allows US employers to temporarily hire foreign workers qualified in “specialized occupations” in medical care industries, technology and finance, and other fields related to Stem.
The two new proposed policies together send “a strong signal signal that the administration wants to go,” said Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Imigration, a company that offers services to people who navigate the immigration process in the United States.
If adopted, policies would benefit companies that seek to keep foreigners with specialized skills who studied in American universities in the United States, as well as to ensure that H-1B visas “are disproportionately to people who are considered more skilled, represented by higher wages and higher wages,” he said.
Trump declared on Friday that changes in the visa system were needed, saying that it was designed to attract temporary workers with “additive functions and qualified high, but has deliberately exploited to replace, instead of complementing, US workers with lower and calm labor.”
For the last H-1B lottery round, which closed its record in March, about 339,000 people were presented. Of those, 120,141 applications for the Lottery were selected, according to USCIS data.
The proposal faces a period of public comments of 30 days before the administration considers it for a final rule, a process that could take months.
If changes are adopted, companies seeking to hire workers with lower salaries in India and China for computer -related work seem to be among the most affected. For more than a decade, about 60% of H-1B workers approved each year have maintained computer-related jobs, according to Pew Research.
New companies and smaller companies that cannot pay their workers in the highest payment categories compared to the main technological companies would also be affected, Wang said.
Deedy Das, a member of Menlo Ventures Venture Capital Group, said in a publication on social networks that the latest proposal would damage many technological companies.
“In general, it is really bad for startups, the first employees, helps consult stores and can be played easily,” Das wrote.
Trump’s announcement of a new $ 100,000 rate in H-1B visas fired a frenzy among current visa holders, the companies that employ them and countries around the world while working to understand the edict.
Finally, the White House clarified that it would be a unique rate and would apply only to the new visa applicants.
Trump said companies would have to pay the rate for the new H-1B Visa requests submitted after September 21. That is a strong increase in current rates, which are generally $ 2,000 to approximately $ 5,000.
It is likely that both the rate and Tuesday’s proposal face challenges in the courts.
A growing choir both on the left and on the right says that an excessive dependence on the visa of US companies has put the workers born in the United States at a disadvantage. The Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, has called the Visa H-1B program as a “scam”, while the Left Left Economic Policy Institute has affirmed that some of the most dependent companies of the H-1B visas, such as Amazon and the parents, goal of Facebook, have also had considerable dismissals, although they did not quote evidence that the use of visas and layoffs.
In the first half of 2025, Amazon received the approval of more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Meta received more than 5,000.
The representatives of both companies did not immediately respond to the requests for comments.
