Last week, US president Donald Trump announced that new H-1B visa applications, the main route for high-skilled foreigners into the US, will now come with a tidy $100,000 price tag. An entry fee, if you like, to the land of the free and the home of the global economy’s growth engine Silicon Valley.
While Americans are good at charging for things that used to be free, the $100,000 price hike to hire an engineer is bold, even by their standards. The White House says this is to protect American jobs, but that’s where the story starts to wobble.
H-1B visas aren’t for fruit pickers or hotel cleaners. Instead, they’re overwhelmingly used for software engineers, data scientists, chip designers, medical researchers. Every Irish person I met teaching at Harvard and MIT was there on a H-1B. Around 70 per cent of H-1B recipients work in computer-related occupations, with the rest concentrated in biotech, medicine and engineering. In other words: the exact sectors the US insists are vital for national competitiveness.
Claiming that a $100,000 fee will “protect American jobs” is like claiming a toll on motorways will inspire more people to become civil engineers. Even Trump’s frenemy Elon Musk pointed out that Tesla and SpaceX depend on immigrant engineers. He knows that Silicon Valley is full of Sergey Brins and Sundar Pichais – immigrants who didn’t displace American workers but created whole industries.
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And yet the policy stands. Which tells us this isn’t about jobs at all.
Enter Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
To understand the new H-1B regime, you have to understand him, not as a mere nodding head, but as one of the Trump movement’s ideologues-in-chief. Miller has always operated from a worldview in which immigration, of any form, corrodes the nation. In his writings and leaked memos, he does not parse immigration by categories such as refugee, asylum seeker, skilled worker. Ideologically, it is all one undifferentiated threat: a dilution of cultural sovereignty, a weakening of demographic control and, ultimately, a contamination of what he frames as American purity.
This is why the $100,000 fee isn’t designed to make economic sense, but to harden a border wall of policy.
In Miller’s ideological architecture, immigration policy is not a lever of competitiveness but a litmus test of loyalty. Economics – GDP growth, innovation, productivity – are secondary, almost irrelevant. Project 2025, the thousand-page blueprint he helped engineer, makes this explicit: the United States should seek self-sufficiency, walling off flows of labour and talent as ruthlessly as it walls off its southern border. This is autarky dressed as nationalism, and it elevates exclusion above any pragmatic calculation.
[ Trump’s H-1B visa fee prompts emergency guidance from companiesOpens in new window ]
That’s why, when Elon Musk heavily protested H1-B reform, his protests went nowhere. Musk, who has never been shy about theatrics, tweeted in December, while being inside the Trump camp: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. ... Take a big step back and F*** YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
If even the world’s richest man, an immigrant himself whose companies depend on armies of foreign engineers, cannot sway the administration, it tells us something fundamental: this isn’t about jobs, economics or even Silicon Valley, once America’s golden goose. When Miller’s creed collides with Musk’s capitalist mandate, the most opaque fringe ideology wins.
And that is the intellectual core of the Trump administration’s immigration doctrine: better to hollow out the innovation economy than allow foreign talent to refresh it. Better to shrink America than for Americanism to be “diluted”. It is the politics of purity, not prosperity.
So here’s the rub from an Irish perspective: Ireland has always thrived on the US’s openness. Our students go there, learn, and come back. Our companies expanded there, plugged into networks, and return with capital. Our multinationals rely on people and ideas flowing across the Atlantic.
If that flow slows; if Irish graduates can’t afford to go, if American firms can’t afford to bring them in, then the whole informal exchange system we’ve built over decades begins to crack. The US is doing more than pricing out talent. It’s dismantling the shared operating system that made countries like Ireland flourish.
So yes, the US is now charging $100,000 to let in an engineer. You can roll your eyes at the absurdity, but don’t miss the punchline: there isn’t one. The joke is that this is deadly serious. It’s not about protecting jobs. It’s about locking the doors. And when even Elon Musk can’t get them reopened, we should take the hint.
Ireland’s relationship with the US was built on the idea that ambition could flow both ways across the Atlantic. Trump’s America is telling us that era is over. The question now isn’t how much a visa costs; it’s whether the door is still open at all.
Sinéad O’Sullivan formerly led the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School
