The $100,000 Visa

Plus: Zohran Mamdani wanted to defund the police in 2022, fourth alleged narcotrafficking boat downed, and more...

The H-1B visa just got a whole helluvalot more expensive: During the pre-weekend Friday news dump, President Donald Trump made some major announcements about our system for skilled immigration.

Under his latest changes, you can essentially buy your way in. Foreigners (who are vetted) may pay $1 million for a "gold card" that will allow them U.S. residency; companies may pay $2 million for the corporate equivalent, which would allow them the ability to sponsor foreigners. "The main thing is we're going to have great people coming in and they're going to be paying," said the president. "We're going to take that money and we're going to be reducing taxes and we're going to be reducing debt."

But at the same time, a new annual fee of $100,000 will be levied on each H-1B visa applicant going forward, which will serve as a big deterrent. Some number of the roughly 500,000 people currently in the U.S. with H-1Bs—high-skill visas used by tech workers, medical workers, and other professionals working in the fields they received degrees in—would have been dissuaded from coming here had the new system been in place. For companies hiring new talent, this fee will be a huge barrier to sponsoring foreign workers—which appears to be the point.

"The company needs to decide…is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the press.

Indian nationals are currently the largest beneficiaries of the program. More than 70 percent of H-1Bs go to Indians, and 12 percent going to Chinese people. Roughly a quarter of the physicians working in the U.S. are foreign-born.

This will be absolutely devastating in the medical field.

~30% residents are international medical graduates & ~10k of 43k residency spots are filled by docs with H1-B visas.

Previously the h-1B fee was <$5,000.

No hospital will pay a $100k fee for a $55k resident salary. https://t.co/TVywuoBT18

— Nick Mark MD (@nickmmark) September 19, 2025

The Trump Administration's proclamation that slaps a $100,000 fee on H-1Bs cites a flawed study from the left wing Economic Policy Institute as justification.

The study claims that employers underpay their H-1B workers by 36% because it deliberately overlooks the fact that… pic.twitter.com/dPZywJ1yO3

— Sam Peak (@SpeakSamuel) September 20, 2025

Companies in many industries will probably respond to this shift by offshoring more of their workforces or relying on contract workers. (For the medical industry, this won't really work. Bigger shortages might just become a fact of life.) As with many Trump policies, the effects won't be felt immediately—existing visa holders are grandfathered in—but the medium-term effects will be, and it will be hard for firms to anticipate what hiring should look like in future. Will this policy, in fact, be reversed after Trump's term ends? Does this mean the pipeline will dry up between now and then, or will aspirants continue to bank on H-1Bs being available to them a few years from now? Is there in fact enough American demand—and skill—for roles in these industries?

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Scenes from New York: When running for state Assembly in 2022, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said he wanted to reduce the New York Police Department (NYPD) "by 1,300 officers through attrition." He also called for "immediately" ending police overtime, freezing hiring, canceling new officer classes and "institut[ing] a moratorium on all new equipment purchases."

"We can't reform our way out of a racist police system that's working exactly as designed—as a means of control over Black & brown New Yorkers," he added. This all appeared under a "Defund the NYPD" heading.

"We need to dramatically curtail the power and presence of the NYPD. That means cutting $3 billion from the NYPD budget and reinvesting those savings in health, housing, and community services." The site's "queer liberation" section called for an end to "police harassment of queer people by decriminalizing sex work, defunding the NYPD, divesting from jails and prisons, and reinvesting those savings in appropriate social services."

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QUICK HITS

• "The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia officially recognized Palestine as a state Sunday, a significant shift in foreign policy and a step away from their alignment with the United States, with several other European nations and U.S. allies set to follow suit this week," reports NBC.
• "The Trump administration unveiled a new crackdown Friday on journalists at the Pentagon, saying it will require them to pledge they won't gather any information—even unclassified—that hasn't been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey," reports The Washington Post. "Under the policy, the Pentagon may revoke press passes for anyone it deems a security threat. Possessing confidential or unauthorized information, under the new rules, would be grounds for a journalist's press pass to be revoked."
• "I've had so many people ask, 'Do you feel anger toward this man? Like, do you want to seek the death penalty?'" said Erika Kirk, widow of the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, in an interview with The New York Times. "I'll be honest. I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this. I do not want that man's blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: 'Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?' And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?"
• Fourth boat attacked:

On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was…

— Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) September 19, 2025

Relatedly:

The clandestine deployment of elite U.S. Special Operations forces to the Caribbean suggests that strikes or commando raids inside Venezuela itself may be in the workshttps://t.co/YwtqjKBlrZ

— Eric Schmitt (@EricSchmittNYT) September 20, 2025