Billionaire VC Mike Moritz slams new H-1B visa fee as ‘brutish extortion scheme’

In Brief

The Trump medication past Friday announced a caller $100,000 yearly levy connected H-1B visas, which let 85,000 skilled overseas workers to participate the U.S. each year. The interest applies to companies hiring these workers, chiefly successful tech.

Veteran task capitalist Michael Moritz isn’t having it. In a new, scathing Financial Times op-ed, the erstwhile Sequoia Capital honcho compares the White House to Tony Soprano’s pork store, calling the determination different “brutish extortion scheme.”

Moritz argues that Trump fundamentally misunderstands wherefore tech companies prosecute overseas workers, saying it’s astir skills and filling labour shortages, not replacing Americans oregon cutting costs. The argumentation volition backfire, helium warns, by pushing companies to relocate enactment to Istanbul, Warsaw, oregon Bangalore alternatively of keeping it stateside.

“Engineers with undergraduate degrees from the amended eastbound Europe, Turkish and Indian universities are each spot arsenic good qualified arsenic their American counterparts,” Moritz writes.

Instead of restricting H-1B visas, Moritz suggests doubling oregon tripling them, oregon automatically granting citizenship to overseas nationals earning STEM PhDs from apical U.S. universities. He points to foreign-born CEOs similar Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai arsenic examples of H-1B programme success. (Elon Musk and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger are two others.)

Moritz himself received the precursor visa to the H-1B successful 1979, and ever since, writes the billionaire, “I person felt grateful to the state that welcomed me.”

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