The Trump administration announced a new $100,000 tax on H-1B visas last Friday. This allows 85,000 skilled foreign workers to enter the United States each year. The fees apply primarily to companies employing these workers with engineers.
Veteran venture capitalist Michael Moritz doesn't have it. In the new Scathing Financial Times Op-Ed, former Sequoia Capital Honcho compares the White House to a Tony Soprano pork shop and calls the move another “cruel tor scheme.”
Moritz argues Trump is fundamentally misunderstanding why tech companies hire foreign workers, noting that it's not filling skills and labor shortages, replacing Americans or cutting costs. The policy warns that it will backfire by urging businesses to move their work to Istanbul, Warsaw or Bangalore, rather than maintaining it within the state.
“Engineers who have a bachelor's degree from universities in better Eastern Europe, Turkey and India are just as qualified as their American counterparts,” Moritz wrote.
Instead of restricting H-1B visas, Moritz proposes double or tripling them, or automatically granting citizenship to foreigners who earn STEM PhDs from US universities. He points to foreign-born CEOs like Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Google's Sundar Pichai as examples of success in the H-1B program. (Elon Musk and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger are two others.)
Moritz himself received his pioneering visa to the H-1B in 1979, and since then the billionaire wrote, “I felt grateful to the country that welcomed me.”