Michelle Hackman

A lot of other big business owners, including, you know, big tech, love the H-1B.

And so you see this sort of like policy tug of war taking place where overall, like nothing really happens.

You know, maybe denials for the visa go up a little bit, but for most of the Trump administration, it's not like they made major changes to the program.

You saw sort of a marginal around the edges, Trump and Biden both trying to tweak policies, you know, to make it so that people who are paid better are getting H-1B visas as opposed to people who are being paid lower than Americans, for example.

But I wouldn't say anything like particularly ideological happened with the H-1B under Biden.

But while Trump was out of office,

This sort of tug of war that was happening in the first Trump administration went away and the MAGA right was sort of allowed to like foment and cement its anti-H1B feelings.

You had people sort of using more and more strident sort of racist anti-Indian language to the point where when Trump is sort of elected for the second time, you see tweets from people basically saying, oh, God, you know, we can't be hiring Indians to work at the White House.

It's going to smell like curry.

You had Elon Musk come into this administration.

And then really, really publicly exit.

And it was after he exited that this tug of war that we'd been talking about of, you know, America first, anti-immigrant voices on one side and sort of more pro-business, you know, big hiring voices on the other side goes away.

And suddenly, Stephen Miller's the one in charge.

He's allowed to do what he wants.

And totally out of nowhere, we get this announcement that they're attaching a $100,000 fee to the H-1B visa.

They explicitly say that that is meant to almost shut down the program, that they don't expect a lot of people to pay.

So I think it's really interesting, and it doesn't totally make sense.

You know, Trump hires these people who have these strident interests

anti-immigrant views.

They're zealous in their opinions.