If you read the articles you'll see that even Microsoft is telling people to get back to the US to avoid this fee. Not even big companies want to pay it. You have forgotten what the H1B visa was supposed to be for. It was to bring in experts that could not be sourced to locally. What it's turned into is people paying for cheap labor from overseas to come here. There is lots of locals with lots of experience and knowledge and skills but too many companies are unwilling to pay the wages that they're worth. So they'll bring in subpar people, who are not experts in their field, to do the work. It leads to a mediocre work product as well.
Because honestly, if they were really an expert with domain-specific knowledge that is difficult to source locally an extra hundred thousand dollars is pennies compared to the profit that they would bring.
Thing is, I would pay $100k extra to have him in office. In my case it's moot because of the travel ban. My point was, this whole thing simply benefits the companies that can afford it - google, meta, amazon etc, who happen to be big contributors to the administration. $100k will not stop them from hiring foreign talent, but it may stop companies like mine. Flagship companies might be psyched about this.
(Prepare For Flagging)
It's really as simple as that. The H-1B visa system has been abused repeatedly by many corporations and you yourself are seeking to abuse it. I have seen many H-1B visa holders and none of them seem to have highly specialized domain-specific knowledge. I'm sure there's a few that do but the vast majority are average computer science graduates from India that get imported. They do average work and there is nothing special about their knowledge or their skills that they're bringing to this country.
So hire people here first. You absolutely are going to need to pay a US citizen a good 30 to 50% more than what you're going to pay that mediocre H-1B person because if you were looking for a highly specialized person with domain-specific knowledge then you would pay the US person or the H1B person the exact same wage. This fee for H1B Visas is now going to make these companies, and yourself, look very seriously about your hiring practices and your abuse of the system. Because if you need the specialized person the cost is insignificant. Because a one-time $100,000 fee is pennies compared to the salary that you should be paying yearly which is $200,000, and that 200k is not including all of the cost of employment and taxations that you have to pay.
So there's massive holes in your entire story. You're either not seeking skilled domain specific knowledge people or you are absolutely underpaying people who are highly skilled with domain-specific knowledge.
I'm a startup with modest angel funding. We can't compete with larger companies salary-wise and so far I haven't been able to find competent people who are willing the play the startup game when they can get half a mil straight out of school. We have only a handful of software engineers. But I don't have to tell you because like you said, you know exactly what my situation is.
This clearly isn't a productive conversation so let's just drop it. Enjoy your weekend!
I think if you'll refer back to my original response I acknowledge that I do not like The vast majority of immigration related policies that have been instituted under the Trump administration. It was only this one specifically about H1B visas that I do agree with. So you were apparently talking about not H1B visas which resulted in this confusion.