Donald Trump’s latest immigration announcement, branding HB-1 visas with a $100,000 fee and dangling a so-called “Golden Green Card” if holders invest $1 million, is nothing more than a shakedown. This isn’t policy—it’s a pathetic attempt to turn America’s skilled worker program into a pay-to-play scheme. Instead of attracting the best and brightest minds to drive innovation, the U.S. is now trying to milk them like cash cows. The message is unmistakable: your talent is secondary, your money comes first.
For the tech sector, this is disastrous. America’s global competitiveness has always rested on its ability to attract top-tier engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Slapping a six-figure entry fee onto the visa process, then demanding a million-dollar investment for a green card, turns the U.S. from a magnet for talent into a gated community for the wealthy. Companies already facing shortages of skilled workers will pay the price, forced to cover these absurd costs or watch critical hires drift away to friendlier markets like Canada, Europe, or Singapore. In practice, this makes innovation more expensive, startups less viable, and wages artificially inflated in the wrong places.
Even worse, the psychological effect on global talent cannot be overstated. Why would a brilliant graduate from Bangalore, Lagos, or São Paulo bet their future on a country that treats them as little more than a revenue stream? The people who built Silicon Valley were not millionaires when they arrived—they were dreamers, builders, coders, scientists. Policies like this slam the door on that tradition and invite the next great startup ecosystem to bloom elsewhere. Trump may see dollar signs, but what the world sees is a closed America, scaring off the very people who once defined its economic edge.
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