The Trump administration final Friday announced a brand new $100,000 annual levy on H-1B visas, which permit 85,000 expert overseas staff to enter the U.S. annually. The price applies to firms hiring these staff, primarily in tech.
Veteran enterprise capitalist Michael Moritz isn’t having it. In a brand new, scathing Financial Times op-ed, the previous Sequoia Capital honcho compares the White Home to Tony Soprano’s pork retailer, calling the transfer one other “brutish extortion scheme.”
Moritz argues that Trump basically misunderstands why tech firms rent overseas staff, saying it’s about abilities and filling labor shortages, not changing Individuals or chopping prices. The coverage will backfire, he warns, by pushing firms to relocate work to Istanbul, Warsaw, or Bangalore as a substitute of preserving it stateside.
“Engineers with undergraduate levels from the higher japanese Europe, Turkish and Indian universities are each bit as nicely certified as their American counterparts,” Moritz writes.
As an alternative of limiting H-1B visas, Moritz suggests doubling or tripling them, or mechanically granting citizenship to overseas nationals incomes STEM PhDs from prime U.S. universities. He factors to foreign-born CEOs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai as examples of H-1B program success. (Elon Musk and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger are two others.)
Moritz himself acquired the precursor visa to the H-1B in 1979, and ever since, writes the billionaire, “I’ve felt grateful to the nation that welcomed me.”