We're about to lose a lot of foreign STEM workers

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump announced a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa petitioners. Today on the show, we talk to an economist about how much H-1B visa holders have contributed to US growth, their effects on American-born workers, and why the United States’ competitors are taking advantage of this moment.

Related episodes:

How much international students matter to the economy

The precarity of the H-1B work visa

Could foreign workers unlock America's tight labor market?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.5	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.7	I'm Waylon Wong, and I'm joined by Daryan Woods, freshly back from his honeymoon.
0:19.0	Congratulations.
0:20.4	Hi.
0:24.3	How is your trip? It was mixed.
0:33.3	So most notably, I was on the beach with my now wife and she gets a text message from her boss and it's saying, are you in the country? Oh my gosh. And we're like, what, what happened? And so
0:40.2	we look at the news and Donald Trump has announced that there is this new, huge $100,000 fee for
0:48.9	new entrants into the country for people with H-1B visas. And my wife is on an H-1B visa.
0:56.9	Oh, my gosh.
0:57.7	This was such a huge news story last week, and you were living it.
1:01.5	I could not escape the news.
1:03.1	It was very frustrating, just as you're trying to unwind.
1:06.2	And so we take this very panicked, tearful trip to the Barcelona airport.
1:13.2	And we're reconsidering, like, you know, what country do we live in?
1:16.8	It's really stressful.
1:18.5	And we missed the last flight out of Barcelona to the U.S. before the deadline.
1:24.3	Oh, my gosh.
1:24.9	And so we're just thinking, what do we do now? Oh my gosh. Daryan, what a nightmare.
1:30.3	Yeah. And it was actually good news that we missed that flight because we still had a couple of days
1:34.8	on our honeymoon left. And we later discovered that there was a clarification that actually this
1:40.3	didn't apply to existing visa holders as only for new applicants for H-1B visas.
	...

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