Last month the White House released a new policy on H1B visas, dramatically increasing the cost companies pay to the government when they hire a foreign national. The new charge appears to be $100,000 per person. Previous charges were a few thousand dollars.

These visas are common in the science and technology fields. A total of about 600,000 H1B visa holders worked in the U.S. last year.

The statement introducing the policy feels like a concentrated expression of the administration’s attitude toward immigrants. The argument assumes there are a certain number of science and technology jobs available. Every job done by an immigrant, so the logic goes, is a job not done by a U.S. citizen.

Thus, U.S. citizens are worse off because of H1B visas.

This argument probably makes a lot of sense

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