Washington: Despite an interim stay being imposed by a court, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Friday to extend the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for another 12 months, until September 2027.
A US court has stayed collection of the fee till a final judgment is passed. Trump, however, extended it before its expiry on September 21. This would mean that the proclamation would immediately come into effect if the court vacates the stay.
The US president has also signed an executive order directing his top Cabinet officials to consider an employer’s recent or planned layoffs of US workers when considering H-1B visa applications.
A White House statement characterised these moves as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to crack down on alleged abuse of the H-1B visa programme, which has been a preferred route for Indian professionals to work in and immigrate to the United States, as reported by Hindustan Times.
Despite the court’s intervention in June this year, the $100,000 visa fee had led to a major reduction in the use of the H-1B visa, the US administration said.
“Since the 2025 Proclamation took effect, H-1B registrations filed by the largest IT outsourcing firms have been reduced by 92%,” the White House said in a statement.
The alleged abuse of the H-1B visa programme had led to significant downward pressure on wages for US workers and even the outsourcing of jobs, the Trump administration has argued. This problem is particularly acute among students and professionals in the tech industry, it has claimed.
“The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States had more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, while overall STEM employment only increased 44.5% during that time. The share of IT workers with H-1B visas had risen from 32% in FY 2003 to over 65% in recent years before the 2025 Proclamation. The Proclamation has also caused a nearly 97% decrease in consular processing requests and a shift from lower-paid foreign labor toward higher-skilled and higher-wage workers,” the White House argued on Friday.
The Department of Homeland Security’s December 2025 rule to replace the randomised H-1B visa lottery with a weighted system based on wage levels had led to a nearly 40% drop in application registrations.
In August, the Trump administration proposed a fresh $103,265 H-1B visa fee that would also affect applicants within the United States applying for the roughly 85,000 capped H-1B visas available every year. This would adversely affect foreign students hoping to enter the US workforce and other first-time H-1B applicants already in the country, who were not covered by September 2025’s $100,000 fee.
