High-skilled visas have problems; $100,000 fee won't fix them

AFTER the White House’s startling changes to the nation’s high-skilled visa program, employers have moved from shock to acceptance.

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Some are strategizing how to work with the new rules. Others are making plans to litigate. And many wish the Trump administration had heeded the piles of ideas to fix the program’s central, widely acknowledged failing.

Since the early 2000s, demand for specialized workers has far outstripped a cap that remains where it stood when the H-1B program started in 1990. The government allocates the visas randomly, and outsourcing companies have learned to flood the system with applications for relatively low-paid positions.

The Trump administration said it wanted to stop that practice and reserve the coveted visas for the most valuable workers, so they do not displace American software programmers, researchers and engineers. The solutions the administration chose — a $100,000 fee for new visas and a complex weighting system to favor higher-paid jobs — are unlikely to accomplish that.

Instead, loopholes appear likely to allow outsourcing companies to adapt while startups, universities and research organizations lose out, according to experts from across the political spectrum.

“Something that addresses the right problem and sounds good on paper can still lead you down the exactly same problematic road,” said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank that has studied the H-1B program.

‘A REALLY HIGH BARRIER’

Any comfort that might have come from certainty about the administration’s long-awaited action was erased by the likelihood of legal challenges to the new rules. A provision for exemptions based on the “national interest” — which the White House suggested it might grant to doctors, for example — has kept workers and employers hoping for clemency.

“They want to create a really high barrier that gives them discretion to bring people to them to make a deal,” Mr. Lettieri said.