When a $100,000 H-1B fee hit offshore hiring, Big Tech adapted by aggressively poaching foreign talent already residing inside the United States. Now, with the Department of Homeland Security proposing a sweeping $103,265 replacement fee and introducing a wage-weighted lottery system, the rules of global tech recruitment are being completely rewritten. The result? Smaller US firms are being priced out, international graduates face an unprecedented barrier, and American companies are realising it is far more cost-effective to build distributed teams in Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town than to pay six-figure immigration taxes. In the latest edition of Digital Nomads, EMMANUEL NWOSU breaks down the data behind America’s shifting visa policies, and explains why higher walls around Silicon Valley will ultimately push Big Tech to take the jobs to African talent.
In September 2025, United States President Donald Trump signed Proclamation 10973, an executive order requiring a $100,000 fee for certain H-1B petitions involving offshore workers seeking entry into the United States.
The H-1B visa enables US employers to hire foreign professionals in specialised occupations, predominantly spanning technology, engineering, and roles requiring high-level technical expertise.
The administration maintained that the measure aimed to curb systemic abuse within the H-1B programme and protect domestic workers.
By February 2026, roughly five months after the policy took effect, a government lawyer disclosed in federal court that only around 70 employers had paid the $100,000 fee. While minuscule, that figure reflected the mandate’s narrow focus: it targeted offshore talent seeking entry, leaving US businesses free to recruit and transfer H-1B holders already residing in the country without paying the levy.
This created a two-track market for global talent, heavily favouring tech giants best equipped to poach from the pool of foreign workers already on US soil.
Those 70 payments represented a mere fraction of the 406,348 H-1B petitions approved by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in fiscal year 2025—the latest full-year dataset illustrating the programme’s massive scale. Crucially, the vast majority of these approvals were extensions, amendments, or change-of-employer petitions rather than the offshore visas targeted by the fee.
During a court hearing in Oakland, California, government attorneys cited the low uptake to argue that the fee was not an unlawful tax. Conversely, plaintiffs—including an international healthcare recruitment firm—contended that the prohibitive cost actively deterred employers from bringing in qualified professionals from abroad.
Empirical data now confirms that the $100,000 surcharge did not suppress American demand for foreign tech expertise; instead, it fractured the market by penalising direct offshore hiring while insulating onshore recruitment.
Who kept hiring?
Tech companies neatly circumvented the offshore fee by pivoting toward eligible foreign professionals already residing in the United States.
Because Proclamation 10973 applied strictly to offshore candidates seeking physical entry, it exempted H-1B holders already in the US who were simply transferring sponsorship to a new employer.
An analysis of employer data by PitchBook revealed that OpenAI, the AI lab behind ChatGPT, logged 27 new-employment H-1B approvals in the first half of fiscal year (FY) 2026 alone, surpassing the 21 it secured throughout all of FY2025. Payments giant Stripe saw its new-employment approvals double from 23 to 46 over the same timeframe.
However, the most drastic pivot occurred in change-of-employer transfers. Data and AI provider Databricks registered 89 transfers in H1 FY2026, while HR software platform Rippling logged 54. Anthropic, creator of Claude, secured 25 new-employment approvals in FY2025 but only a single one in H1 FY2026—pivoting instead to 48 change-of-employer approvals. OpenAI recorded 126 transfers in that same six-month window.
In US immigration mechanics, a new-employment petition involves bringing a candidate in from abroad or adjusting the status of someone in the US under a different visa. A change-of-employer petition simply transfers an existing H-1B holder to a new firm. Trump’s policy explicitly penalised the former route for offshore recruits while leaving onshore transfers completely untouched.
USCIS data underscores the sheer size of this domestic pool. By June 30, 2026—the close of Q3 FY2026—OpenAI had secured approval for 304 total H-1B petitions, up from 211 across all of FY2025. This metric encompasses new filings, transfers, extensions, and amendments, rather than an absolute headcount of individual employees.
While OpenAI did not rank among the top 100 H-1B sponsors in FY2025, it climbed to 79th by mid-2026. Apple similarly surpassed its total FY2025 allocation by Q3, while other tech conglomerates remained on track to match or exceed their prior-year benchmarks before the September 30 fiscal year-end.
These corporations were not doubling overseas intake; they were aggressively mining the domestic talent pool. This structural divide was an inevitable byproduct of Trump’s executive order: well-capitalised tech firms with vast recruiting budgets easily poached onshore H-1B talent without paying a dime to relocate engineers from Lagos, Nairobi, or Bangalore. Conversely, smaller firms lacking deep domestic networks were left stranded.
Immigration attorneys interviewed by PitchBook confirmed that small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) were forced to stall foreign hiring or overhaul recruitment strategies due to prohibitive costs. The order effectively consolidated market dominance among deep-pocketed tech giants capable of monopolising onshore talent.
Ironically, the enterprises best equipped to continue foreign hiring were precisely those least impacted by the surcharge.
A temporary measure overturned
Proclamation 10973, enacted on September 19, 2025, was explicitly framed as a temporary 12-month measure.
It is no longer operational. In June 2026, a Massachusetts federal judge struck down the order, ruling that the mandatory $100,000 payment constituted an unconstitutional tax unauthorized by US Congress. Although the administration appealed, the First Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay the injunction on July 24, leaving the rule effectively dead pending appeal.
Yet, the US has already proposed a replacement. On August 25, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a $103,265 fee for each H-1B petition subject to the annual cap, including petitions filed under the US advanced-degree exemption. The fee is not yet in effect, as the proposal is open for public comment until September 24.
Unlike Trump’s executive order, this proposal would eliminate the loophole between onshore transfers and offshore recruitment. The $103,265 levy would apply universally to new petitions under the annual 85,000 cap (65,000 standard, plus 20,000 master’s exemptions), sparing only cap-exempt institutions such as universities and non-profit research centres.
The critical shift is not the additional $3,265—it is the expanded scope. While the original proclamation applied strictly to offshore arrivals, DHS’s new rule applies to cap-subject petitions regardless of whether the applicant is residing abroad or inside the United States.
That could hit international students particularly hard. For example, a student who comes to the US for a master’s degree can work through Optional Practical Training (OPT), allowing eligible international students to work in the country for a limited period after completing their studies. The student would already be in the US when an employer later files an H-1B petition. Yet, under the proposed rule, the employer could face the $103,265 fee anyway.
Such a prohibitive cost is a barrier that small and mid-sized enterprises simply cannot absorb, further tilting the immigration ecosystem toward deep-pocketed tech conglomerates.
Trump’s original order left small- and medium-sized employers with one survival strategy: poaching onshore H-1B holders via fee-free transfer petitions. The DHS proposal effectively closes that escape route for new cap entries.
Consequently, foreign professionals will face a stark ultimatum: prove irreplaceable enough for Big Tech to finance their sponsorship, or pursue careers outside the United States.
DHS estimated that the fee charged under the proposed rules would bring in about $8.78 billion. The agency said the money would help cover immigration-related costs across the federal government.
Higher-paid jobs get a better shot
Getting an H-1B could also become more dependent on the job’s wage level.
For FY2027, the government replaced the purely random H-1B lottery with a wage-weighted system. Registrations tied to higher-paid positions now receive greater weight, based on the Department of Labour’s four wage levels.
H-1B jobs are assigned one of four wage levels, based on the occupation, location, and experience required. Level I is the entry-level wage, while Level IV is the highest.
A senior engineer in a higher-paid role therefore has better odds of landing an H-1B visa than someone applying for an entry-level position, regardless of sponsor.
The change coincided with a much smaller pool. In an X post in May, USCIS said it received 211,600 eligible registrations for FY2027, down from 343,981 the previous year. Among those selected, 71.5% had a US advanced degree, while 17.7% were at the lowest wage level.
The change adds another hurdle for younger African tech workers trying to enter the US market. A strong job offer is no longer the only consideration: the wage attached to the role can also affect the chances of getting an H-1B.
Those filters can still produce very different outcomes for workers from countries with much smaller H-1B footprints. Nigeria—and much of Africa—has never been close to India or China in H-1B approval numbers.
In FY2025, India accounted for 69.9% of approved H-1B petitions and China about 12.1%. No other country accounted for more than 2%. Nigeria’s total was just over 2,400 approvals in the same year, the highest in Africa. The data also match previous year records, showing India and China’s dominance.
Despite the smaller figure for Africa, the H-1B still matters to people who have built, are building, or aspire to build careers around the US tech market. Taken together, they make the market harder to reach for talent coming from outside the country.
What this means for African talent
This does not signal an end to US demand for African technical prowess. AI pioneers, fintech unicorns, and software conglomerates face an acute global deficit of specialised engineering talent.
Rather, the battleground is shifting from physical relocation to remote distribution. Faced with a $100,000+ immigration tax, US firms will increasingly opt to hire engineers directly in Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town. US-educated African graduates unable to secure H-1B sponsorship will either leverage alternative visas or return home to join distributed engineering teams.
Alternative green card pathways are also gaining momentum. Employment-Based (EB) permanent residency categories provide viable alternatives for exceptionally qualified professionals and researchers.
Specifically, the EB-1 visa caters to individuals of extraordinary ability—a favourite among startup founders—while the EB-2 National Interest Waiver (NIW) allows high-impact tech professionals and entrepreneurs to bypass traditional employer sponsorship altogether.
While EB visas carry rigorous evidentiary thresholds and processing backlogs, they offer a direct route to permanent residency as the H-1B pathway grows increasingly cost-prohibitive.
Trump’s initial surcharge forced US tech companies to look inward for onshore talent. DHS’s proposed $103,265 expansion, combined with a wage-weighted lottery favouring senior salaries, fundamentally reshapes global tech recruitment.
Paradoxically, by erecting higher legal and financial walls around Silicon Valley, the US government may accelerate the rise of global distributed work—forcing American tech companies to take the jobs to African talent, rather than bringing African talent to the jobs.
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