An entry‑level software engineer in San Francisco would need to be paid $162,000 a year to qualify for an H‑1B visa under a Trump administration proposal - almost 30% more than today. In Dallas, the minimum would jump by a similar rate to $113,000 and in New York to $132,000.
Those are the types of pay increases potentially in store for immigrants using the most popular path for white-collar workers to enter or stay in the US. It's part of changes to the H-1B program that the Trump administration says will help prevent foreigners from undercutting Americans' wages.
The plan to boost minimum salaries would cost the biggest employers of white-collar foreign talent at least $18 billion in the first 12 months, according to an analysis by immigration data companies Lawfully and Threshold. Within three years - when most existing H-1B visas will have to be renewed at the higher level - the annual cost could reach as high as $43 billion, the study found.
The financial hit for employers is only half the story. The new thresholds are ultimately likely to shrink opportunities for young talent as employers balk at spending the extra money.
President Donald Trump campaigned for his second term on a promise to crack down on all types of immigration, and his most high-profile efforts have focused on rounding up and deporting those who crossed the southern border illegally. But he's also worked to clamp down on opportunities for professionals to come to the US, saying that the system was rife with abuse and exploitation.
In its notice earlier this year proposing the salary requirements, which awaits final approval from the Labor Department, the administration said H-1B visa holders are generally offered about $10,000 less a year than their US counterparts.
Backers see Trump's proposal as a way to level the playing field for Americans and ensure the visas are being used for their stated purpose - to bring in exceptional talent in sectors where there's a shortage of highly-skilled workers.
Employers are already cutting back on H-1B visas for entry-level and less experienced workers because of the increased expense, easing the path for the most lucrative employees. The affects go beyond tech, of course, to other sectors that use H-1Bs including finance, medicine, civil engineering, research and education.
There has to be a way "to ensure that you're not distorting the labor market," said Ronil Hira, an associate professor in political science at Howard University. "The simplest way to do that is to ensure that the folks who are being brought in really do have specialized skills, and the way to signal that is by wages."
Before a recent crackdown, staffing firms that place IT professionals in other companies had played an outsize role in the annual H-1B lotteries used to assign the visas, often by flooding the pool with tens of thousands of applicants with unremarkable resumes who could be paid lower wages.
The Trump administration has sought to crack down on those firms. Last year, the administration imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B candidates outside the US and announced changes to the visa lottery that favor higher earners. The new minimum salary thresholds are the latest salvo in that effort.
Those higher thresholds will have the biggest impact on foreign graduates of US universities, many of whom study computer engineering and other scientific fields to prepare for careers in tech.
For more than two decades, they had a fairly straightforward path for entry: Graduate from a US university, which allows for one to three years of work authorization, then find an employer to sponsor an H-1B. Some workers who have gone down this path eventually became titans of business, including Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., and Satya Nadella, the CEO at Microsoft Corp.
The H-1B program will likely shift to becoming a path only for established foreign workers who can justify a high salary, according to Finn Reynolds, the head of insights at Lawfully.
"This is a multipronged attack on the pipeline," Reynolds said. "There is no avoiding the cost increase from this change."
The salary thresholds are determined by the job, its location and the worker's experience.
The H-1B visa was created in 1990 as part of a broader overhaul designed to let employers temporarily hire foreign workers in "specialty occupations" requiring at least a bachelor's degree. That coincided with the growth of the US tech industry, whose lobbyists pushed heavily for the program. By 2010, roughly 20% of US STEM workers were international.
The program gained such popularity, with demand far outpacing availability by the mid-2000s, that the George W. Bush administration created a lottery system to randomly award the annual allotment of 85,000 visas.
Pichai, the Alphabet CEO, first came to the US as an international student to attend Stanford University, where he got a master's degree in materials science and engineering. He eventually moved to an H-1B and has been vocal about immigrants' contributions to American innovation.
In an interview with the BBC in November, Pichai said that while he understands the H-1B visa system has its "shortcomings," immigrants' contribution to the technology sector "has been nothing but phenomenal."
There are other ways to bring talented individuals to the US. The government offers "extraordinary ability" visas, generally designed for people who can be described as being in the top 1% of their field. There are also visas for intracompany transfers of executives or managers.
But the H-1B has become the most popular pathway for foreign hiring by American companies for early-career and mid-level jobs.
Some companies might respond to the new H-1B rules by moving jobs overseas, according to Kevin Miner, a partner at immigration law firm Fragomen. Others - particularly in the manufacturing sector - need to keep operations in the US and will have to pay up to access the talent they need, he said.
"That's an extra cost employers haven't planned for, and it's going to cause them to have to pay well above market in an already competitive market in a lot of places," Miner said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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