This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq. and Janice Chen, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.
On Friday, September 19, 2025, the Trump Administration published a Proclamation – “Restriction on Entry of Certain Non-Immigrant Workers” – which purported to impose a $100,000 ‘supplemental fee’ on all petitions, with the penalty being that visas – that is, entry documents provided by the US Embassies and consulates abroad – would not be issued for any beneficiary of a petition for which the supplemental fee had not been paid. The Proclamation did not explain whether this $100,000 ‘supplemental fee’ applied only to prospective H-1B petitions or to current petitions. The plain text of the Proclamation suggested that it applied to all H-1B workers “currently outside the United States” as of 12:01 AM EST on September 21, 2025. Therefore, every H-1B visaholder who happened to be outside the U.S. on September 19th had excellent reason to panic. Corporations, including Google, and Amazon, reacted rationally by telling their workers to drop everything and fly home, pronto.
On Saturday, September 20, 2025, USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow published a one-page memorandum that walked back the worst elements of the Proclamation. It clarified matters, at least to a degree, by stating that the proclamation “only applies prospectively to petitions that have not yet been filed” and not to current H-1B visaholders. On Sunday, September 21, 2025, the Department of State and Customs and Border Protection released similar clarifications.
The result of this haphazard rollout was – predictably – chaos, which sparked criticism across the ideological spectrum, from Steve Bannon to tech industry trade groups. Even the attempts to reassure current H-1B visaholders fell flat, because – incredibly – the Administration appears not to have decided yet whether the $100,000 surcharge is annual or once every three years, or whether it applies to changes of employer outside the annual lottery process.
This chaos managed to overshadow another massive change to the H-1B process – a notice of proposed regulatory action, by which the Administration is seeking to eliminate the current H-1B lottery, which allocates visas randomly so long as the proposed employment meets the threshold qualifications and does not fall the prevailing wages observed by the Department of Labor. In its place, the Administration is seeking to create a ‘weighted’ system which prioritizes positions that are being paid at higher than the prevailing wage. Note that, unlike the 2021 proposed revisions, this new proposed system doesn’t prioritize the highest-wage positions, as an absolute matter, but rather prioritizes those positions with the greatest difference between the wage offered to the foreign employee and the prevailing wage. If the prevailing wage for legal secretaries is $50,000 per year and you offer to pay a foreign legal secretary $150,000 per year, the new weighted lottery system prioritizes your application over an application for a foreign AI researcher who earns much more.
It’s difficult to say why the Administration rolled out the new $100,000 surcharge in this way. It seems likely that the speed of the rollout was intentional; if the Administration had provided even two weeks’ notice, companies would have rushed to file new applications before the deadline. But, given that intentionality, it is hard to understand why the Administration didn’t foresee the inevitable consequences of sloppy drafting – in cost, heartache, and legal bills – and work to prevent them.
Who was at fault for this? We’ll have to wait for the memoirs and tell-alls to be released. The official White House ‘Rapid Response 47’ Twitter account offered an interesting theory: “Corporate lawyers and others with agendas are creating a lot of FAKE NEWS around President Trump’s H-1B Proclamation.”
The White House didn’t mean to include Statutes of Liberty in its criticism, and properly so. We don’t traffic in fake news. We’re real advertisers.
Readers are, as always, invited to ask questions, real or fake,, and we will do our best to respond.
