Businesses across the world are still making sense of the Trump administration’s new rules surrounding the H-1B visa program, and experts say it could impact the tech-heavy employers in the Austin area.
The program, which has been around for 35 years, is meant to entice foreign nationals into skilled jobs in the U.S. Over the last decade, many of those jobs have been in the tech sector.
But new guidelines aimed at curbing migration would increase costs for companies hoping to recruit an employee from just a few thousand dollars to $100,000 per new application.
The White House said the H-1B program was meant to attract temporary workers, but it has been “deliberately exploited” to replace American workers. The rules went into effect Sunday.
Dave Porter heads up the Economic Development Partnership initiative in Williamson County, where Samsung has a $6.4 billion semiconductor chip plant in Taylor. He said the new rules make expanding manufacturing in Texas difficult.
"For an administration that promotes itself to be business-friendly," Porter said. "This doesn't appear to be that."
Other employers in Central Texas — including Oracle, Tesla and Samsung — have relied heavily on the program in the past few years to hire new workers. Oracle and Tesla lead the Central Texas region in applications, according to federal data.
This fiscal year, Oracle dwarfed other businesses using the program in the Austin area, applying for nearly 2,100 H-1B visas, compared to Tesla's applied for 727 visas.
Samsung applied for just 74 H-1B visas, its lowest number since 2017.
Porter said the new fees muddy the longterm hiring prospects for tech companies and could run the risk of making Samsung and other international companies leery of more longterm investments in Central Texas.
On top of that, Porter said, the program's increase in fees comes as employers grapple with other financial headwinds, including the Trump administration's tariffs on foreign goods and the uncertainty of whether the Federal Reserve will continue to cut interest rates.
"The visa situation and the tariff situation come across at least from an international viewpoint as an anti-business," he said.
The immediate impact, at least for now, isn't quite as clear for Austin-area employers, said Jeremy Martin, president and CEO of the Austin Chamber of Commerce.
Martin said businesses are accustomed to changes in the program, which has had a fluctuating cap on applications over the past few years, but it is still hard for employers to read the tea leaves.
"People are monitoring it for now," he said. "[They're] waiting to see additional clarification."
Mike Coffey, president of Imperative Information Group and a Texas Association of Business chairman, told The Texas Newsroom the rules could make it difficult for smaller businesses to attract workers from foreign countries.
"It makes it difficult for small firms to compete for talent with large firms that can eat that cost," Coffey said, though he said he thinks the fees will come down in the future.
The Texas Newsroom's Blaise Ganey contributed to this story.
