Catholic immigration advocates express concern about new $100,000 H-1B visa fee

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — President Donald Trump raised the fee for an H-1B visa to $100,000 on Sept. 19, creating some confusion for employers and prompting concern for Catholic immigration advocates.

In a Sept. 19 proclamation, Trump argued, “The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

Previously, those visa fees were set from about $2,000 to $5,000 per application.

But Trump argued, “It is therefore necessary to impose higher costs on companies seeking to use the H-1B program in order to address the abuse of that program while still permitting companies to hire the best of the best temporary foreign workers.”

Anna Gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, also known as CLINIC, told OSV News Sept. 22 that the organization “strongly opposes the steep new H-1B visa fee, which sets a troubling precedent for pricing people out of legal immigration pathways.”

“If left unchecked, these kinds of financial barriers could extend to other visa categories, further eroding fairness and access in our immigration system,” she said.

But J. Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the former director of migration policy for the USCCB, suggested “this is an issue which, strangely enough, the church might agree somewhat with the administration, although for an entirely different reason.”

“The church has historically taken the position that recruiting highly skilled and educated workers from abroad amounts to a ‘brain drain’ from poorer countries, leaving those countries less able to develop,” Appleby told OSV News. “By recruiting the best talent from other nations, it has been argued, the gap between rich and poor countries only widens. This is not to mention that the U.S. needs to put more resources into math and science education, as we have fallen behind in those fields, so that US students are more prepared to enter into highly skilled fields.”

“So, while the approach of charging such a high fee for a visa is questionable, the idea of regulating how we recruit highly skilled foreign workers and its impact on poor nations is not,” he argued.

The proclamation prompted some confusion for visa holders and their employers, who questioned whether it was a one-time or annual fee after Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said it was annual. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X it was “a one-time fee,” that “applies only to new visas, not renewals, and not current visa holders.”

H-1B visas are granted to eligible highly skilled professionals so that they may legally work in specialty fields or occupations in the United States.

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