President Donald Trump, accompanied by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick speaks before signing an executive order in the Oval Office in the White House on Sept. 19, when he signed an executive order establishing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Last month, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation announcing that foreign-born workers or their sponsors will now need to pay an astronomical $100,000 fee in order to obtain an H-1B visa, despite that program’s history of helping to lure much-needed talent to the United States.
While Trump’s proclamation and much of the media coverage of it has focused on the impact the fee will have on the tech sector, small to mid-sized design and engineering firms won’t come close to being able to afford it. Talented foreign workers, many of whom earned degrees in the United States, will also have much more limited access to work in the U.S., worsening a brain drain as other countries look to welcome new talent.
I work as a human resources consultant for about 100 architecture, landscape architecture and interior design firms in the Bay Area, many of which have relied on H-1B visas to help staff their companies with the most talented employees available. For the bulk of these firms, turning a $100,000 profit in a single year is difficult, and many of them struggled to afford the $6,500+ fees paid to lawyers and the federal government for an H1B visa prior to this change.
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Yet, until now, our country has worked to build a pipeline in which foreign nationals are granted student visas to earn degrees at U.S. universities. Those students can then apply for an Optional Practical Training employment benefit that allows them to extend their visa and work in the U.S. for at least one year so long as they are working in the field in which they studied.
For nearly 10 years, I taught at California College of the Arts as an adjunct faculty member in the Architecture and Interiors department. During my tenure with CCA, the student body in our departments became increasingly international so that in a 2014 class of 23 interior design students, only two students hailed from the United States. While the economy was booming and U.S. residents opted out of college or for other areas of study, eager, talented students from around the world filled our universities and then our workplaces.
U.S. employers have greatly benefited from the OPT program, which has minimal paperwork requirements and no fees. It has helped companies build up teams made up of talent from all over the world, and that broad range of experiences has brought broad, new perspectives into design and engineering projects.
After two-to-three years with a firm, these talented OPT recipients often become integral to the companies that hire them. We then placed their names into the H-1B lottery and crossed our fingers. Until now, the H-1B visa offered the most affordable and least cumbersome process for foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for another three years.
But with Trump’s new policy, in addition to his attempts at scaling back foreign student visas, the pipeline will be broken.
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Of course, these changes come at an already unsettling time in which fiercely anti-immigrant policies and ICE raids have visa holders on edge. In architecture and engineering, travel is often a requirement of the job. OPT and H-1B visa holders who must regularly cross a border must now worry that a border patrol agent will simply deny them reentry. After the administration announced that it was seeking to revoke Harvard’s OPT program, three visa holders approached me with concerns about a planned work trip within the U.S., others have voiced concerns about returning home for the holidays. This year, I’ve spent many hours coaching OPT visa holders on how to handle encounters with customs officials. This has sidetracked our work and depleted energy that we should be putting into projects.
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The impact of a climate of fear and uncertainty is not abstract. The team designing your child’s school or the medical and lab team that supports your health is likely composed of OPT and H-1B visa holders. If they are turned away because their sponsors can’t afford a $100,000 fee, the projects on which they toiled will suffer and equally skilled workers will not magically appear to take their places. Given that U.S. colleges and universities graduate so many architects and engineers from outside the country each year, we’re standing at the precipice of a brain drain that will have ramifications for years.
A similar drain happened from 2008 to 2010, when many architects and engineers were laid off in the recession and never came back to practice in the U.S. More than a decade later, the architecture and design sectors continue to try to recover from that loss of talent. If the H-1B process continues on the path of a $100,000 fee, I believe it will have similar lasting effects on the quality of our workers, our architecture and our engineering.
Hannah Brown-Lopes is a human resources and business management consultant with Brown Creative Consulting
