The Center for Immigration Studies claimed in a report that the $100,000 fee for H-1B visa petitions did not reduce the number of H-1B visas, as most recipients are already in the US. The visa fee which came to effect since September 2025 is meant for candidates who are not inside the US when the petitions are made, not for those who are present in the country on some other visa programs, John Miano argued in the report. Miano is an expert on the effect of foreign labor on technology workers. But the report already triggered a controversy as David J Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, called it a fake argument and said even if half of prospective H-1B applicants are in the US, cutting the other half will have a major impact. Miano in his report cited data that in 2024, 54% of H-1B beneficiaries were already in the US on some other status. “Assuming 54 percent of the potential beneficiaries were already in the US, that means over 180,000 of the workers were already in the US. Even without playing games with the H-1B process, like moving people into the US temporarily on some other visa, there are more than twice as many aliens entering the lottery who are exempt from the $100,000 fee (i.e., already in the US) as there are visa slots,” Miano observed. Referring to a recent report that this year’s lottery (H-1B visa lottery FY 2027) saw a drop in the number of entries and thereby increased the chance of winning the lottery, Miano said that the fee has no impact as the yearly H-1B quota of 85,000 will be filled up like every other year. “There will be 85,000 quota visas this year, as there were last year and the year before. The $100,000 fee had no effect on that number. The Trump administration did not hand out or approve more visas. The odds of winning the lottery simply improved this year; the approval rate is up, not the number of approvals. The only question is how the $100,000 fee will affect visas not subject to the quota that go to universities or government research. In FY 2024, that was 56,000 visas. That will not be known until the end of the fiscal year,” Miano argued. Bier differed and said that’s still cutting a lot of visas as people who are already in the US are not getting visas if they become H-1B — their status only changes. He said this is bad for the economy as these people who are already in the US probably already contribute to the economy and foreign talent is not getting to come to the US. “And even if we focus on grants of status + visas, the fee will still cut visas on net by reducing issuances to 50K cap-exempt workers,” Bier argued.
$100k fee did not reduce H-1B visas as applicants are already in US, claims foreign labor expert
