TJ Walker argues the U.S. is pricing out skilled workers with a $100,000 H-1B visa hike, pushing them to Canada instead. The move favors only big tech firms and kills the access that let scrappy entrepreneurs build startups in America.
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US Visa hikes open doors for Canada. The cost of applying for an H1B visa in the United States has jumped to $100,000, leaving many skilled workers and tech firms reeling and potentially creating an opening for Canada. According to the BBC, the program has long been the legal pathway for US Companies to hire top international talent. Now, with costs so high, many of those workers may look north. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking in New York this week, pointed to the country's homegrown AI and research expertise. Maybe we can hang on to one or two of them, he said, noting that too much of Canada's talent traditionally leaves for opportunities abroad. Immigration lawyers say this would be a wonderful opportunity for Canada, but they caution that the system here faces its own hurdles. Wages trend lower. Residency can be difficult to secure. The politics around foreign workers remain unsettled. Still, Canada's quality of life and global reputation make it a natural draw. Okay, let's take a moment here and dive a little deeper. What's the real message here? With this $100,000 price tag for foreign workers to come to America, it's now a goldmine opportunity for Canada and other high tech countries. They now have access to some of the most brilliant minds, hardest workers in the world who will come to their country, start businesses there, enrich their citizens. It's a disaster for the United States other than the really big companies like Facebook and Google that pay the bill. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. So there is a theory proposed by Scott Galloway, Kara Swisher, the folks at the On Pivot podcast, which I do subscribe and I do recommend that you do so as well, that when all these big tech guys got together in the White House recently, they planted this bug in Trump's ear and said, look, here's a way for you to look good, look tough, raise money. Why don't you just charge these visa holders, these, these H1B visa holders, $100,000? You can make money and we'll get the best and the brightest. Sure, sounds good. Here's the problem with that theory. If you're the people in that White House room, Mark Zuckerberg, if you're head of Apple, if you're head of Google, if you're head of OpenAI, you've got all the money in the world. It's nothing for you to just be writing hundred thousand dollar checks of government to bring your top talent in. But if you are an entrepreneur, if you're a startup, you don't have that kind of cash. So many of the Most brilliant minds in the world first came to the United States to work on a startup, a shoestring maybe. They had some small salary, a small stipend for a scrappy startup. And then they grew it into something. And then their next company grew, and then the next company grew. Kind of how Elon Musk did things. Yeah, he had a student visa getting in here, but his first startup, PayPal, would not have paid $100,000 for him or anyone else to. They didn't have that kind of money right when they were starting. Now, United States has a lot of things going for it. Geographically, we got oceans on each side. Canada is a nice, stable democracy. We've had no real skirmishes with Mexico in a long time. So it's blessed with a lot of things going. We have huge, huge markets here. We were the only really big economy standing after World War II and it's allowed us to do so many things. We had the dominant currency still. So we got so much capital, so much cash comes into our country, our economy. Our startups get $5 million, VC backed startups for every $1 million that a startup in Europe gets. We have all these advantages. And there's another advantage. It's not just financial capital, it's intellectual capital. The United States has traditionally attracted the smartest, most educated, brightest, most innovative people in the world. They could come here and maybe their first job, they, they only made enough money to live in a small little studio apartment with three other coders, but they wanted to be here. And now that is being destroyed. The ability for that to happen is being destroyed. And it's a big problem. Long term, short term, we're not going to feel the pain. But long term, Canada, other countries, a lot of European countries and others are going to be the beneficiaries because the next Steve Jobs, or father of Steve Jobs, the next Elon Musk is, you know, the, the next CEO of Google and Microsoft, who currently came from India. They're, they're not going to want to come to the us. They're going to want to go to other countries that open them and embrace them. And that's the big problem, this hidden cost. We are destroying our own source of intellectual capital because we're essentially saying you can only come work for a really big company if you have an idea. If you want to work for a scrappy startup, sorry, it's not going to work here any longer.
