The big story is Trump yesterday (9/19/2025) signed an executive order imposing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas. Many are celebrating this as a win against ‘big tech’. Reuters described it as a “blow to tech”. The Washington Post called it a “clampdown on legal immigration”.
One might expect tech stocks to have reacted negatively to this news. But to the contrary, the QQQ closed at a session high and a new historic high despite this executive order, which dropped while the market was open, so market participants had hours to process and digest its implications, and, still, decided it wasn’t that big of a deal. So what gives?
My guess is, first, this executive order is a disguised gift to ‘big tech’, not a hinderance. This statutory $100k fee hurts smaller competitors to big tech companies. This can explain why big tech stocks on Friday brushed off this news, and even rallied that day.
Second, H-1B visas are only a small percentage of the US labor force, at around 750,000 by one estimate, versus 70 million white-collar professionals in the US as of 2023. Also, contrary also to the popular belief that ‘tech companies depend on H-1B visas,’ the number of applicants is tiny relative to the total workforce of major tech companies:
By comparison, Apple employs 124,000 people.
Third, this fee will not reduce the total number of H-1B workers much. Why? This fee only affects new applicants. Also, the H-1B selection process is based off a lottery system. In 2024, there were 758,994 eligible H-1B applications, of which only 110,791 were selected. This fee will likely only have the effect of reducing the backlog and increasing the odds of being approved, by excluding all but those employers who can afford it or deem it worthwhile.
Part of the confusion can be explained by the misconception that tech companies use H-1Bs to reduce costs by substituting skilled labor with inferior labor. But this isn’t really true. H-1B applicants, broadly speaking, are skilled, and are in the 90th percentile of income earners in the US. They go through the same difficult, highly selective multi-stage interview process as any other employee. If anything, it’s harder due to the extra requitements. They aren’t at all like undocumented Hondurans that work off the books for menial or blue-collar jobs.
Rather, to save money on labor, big tech companies rely heavily on temp workers and independent contractors. Google, for example, as of 2019 employed 121,00 temps and contractors compared to 102,000 full-time employees, what it calls the ‘extended workforce‘.