A federal judge appointed by Barack Obama has dealt a significant blow to Donald Trump’s efforts to curtail the hiring of foreign workers, striking down the President’s attempt to impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas as an unlawful tax.
District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled in favour of 20 blue states that had challenged the Trump administration’s September proclamation, which had set the new fee level with the explicit aim of reducing the number of H-1B visas being issued. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s decision defending the Obamacare individual mandate as a tax rather than a penalty, Sorokin concluded that the $100,000 charge was similarly a tax — one that the administration had no authority to impose unilaterally. “The defendants’ arguments to the contrary are unpersuasive,” he wrote.
Trump reacted with frustration when asked about the ruling in New York on Monday evening. “These federal judges are really giving us a hard time,” he told reporters. “They’re hurting our country very badly.”
The H-1B visa programme allows US employers to hire non-citizens for specialist roles, typically for three-year periods with extensions permissible up to six years. Before Trump’s proclamation, employers paid fees in the thousands of dollars. The President’s own White House described the $100,000 fee as a necessary measure to protect American workers, stating in a fact sheet: “American workers are being replaced with lower-paid foreign labor, creating an economic and national security threat.”
The tech sector was expected to feel the biggest impact of the fee hike, given its heavy reliance on the programme. According to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 72 per cent of H-1B holders are from India, with 12 per cent from China.
The ruling has exposed the continuing fault lines within the Republican Party over the visa programme. House Republican Greg Steube has introduced legislation seeking to abolish H-1B entirely, arguing on X that “American workers have been ripped off by the corrupt H-1B visa program for far too long” and that corporations had repeatedly abused the system to suppress wages by importing cheaper foreign labour. Steube pushed his legislation again on social media following the ruling.
Not all Republicans are opposed to the programme’s continuation, however. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska described Sorokin’s decision as a “welcome relief,” citing her state’s reliance on imported teachers for remote rural school districts as evidence that the programme serves genuine needs that the domestic labour market cannot always fill.
