How the New H-1B Visa Fee Could Hit Travel Companies
Photo Credit: President Trump en route to a meeting in the Oval Office. Flickr / The White House
Skift Take
Tech is hyperventilating about the whopping new $100K fee for H-1B visas. Travel shouldn’t breathe easy either.
Since President Donald Trump revealed a new $100,000 price tag for H-1B visas, uncertainty has gripped the tech sector, while airlines dealt with frantic passengers booking, rebooking, and even canceling trips out of fear over the weekend.
For travel companies, H-1B visas — which allow employers to hire well-educated foreign professionals for specialty roles demanding highly specialized knowledge — don’t cast as big a shadow as they do over the tech sector. But they could still be affected.
According to government data, the top employers with the most H-1B approvals include familiar names, like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These three tech titans account for nearly 20,000 approved visas, and even more with cloud businesses folded in.
Courtesy of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration ServicesTravel accounts for far fewer, numbering in the low thousands. But the industry could become collateral damage as the world’s major tech platforms g
