If the tech industry could craft its own H-1B visa policy, what would it look like?
Box CEO and cofounder Aaron Levie and three Andreessen Horowitz partners recently debated President Donald Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee on “The A16z Podcast.” The new policy has sparked much discussion in Silicon Valley, with some lauding its potential to prevent the over-hiring of international applicants and others arguing it would weaken startups and hurt innovation.
Levie outlined six attributes he said that an H-1B policy should have to both protect American labor and keep tech strong.
First, Levie said that the government had to clarify the goals of such a policy. “What are we optimizing for?” he asked.
“Are we optimizing for, we don’t want to have wages go down? That’s an interesting thing,” Levie said. “Are we optimizing for just ensuring that we only have the highest merit people on the planet coming here? Those are all totally different goals to optimize for.”
If he had his way, Levie said he would optimize for the latter, bringing in the best talent. His strategy would be to bring the “absolute best in the world here.”
That doesn’t mean an H-1B policy could set a hard cap on the number of visas granted. There’s not a “fixed number” of the world’s best talent, Levie said.
“Some years there might be 5,000, some years there might be 50,000, some years there might be 80,000,” he said.
Critics of ample H-1B visa access don’t only complain that international applicants displace American labor. They also say that H-1B workers are wage suppressors. According to Department of Labor data, 30% of H-1B workers make $100,000 or less each year, while 10% make over $200,000.
Levie’s third position is that the H-1B policy should ensure wages are lifted.
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“We probably want them to be net positive to wages,” Levie said. “Let’s agree that, in any given industry or locale, wages should go up with this talent pool as opposed to down.”
Next, Levie said that access to H-1B labor should never crush an entire industry. For example, you should never be able to “exploit the talent pools” to “wipe out IT jobs” in Detroit, he said.
A good H-1B policy also shouldn’t restrict the hiring of junior-level talent, the CEO said. Levie gave the example of a Master’s student at a state school who graduates to a position as an AI engineer, but isn’t in the top echelon of AI talent who can command $100 million Meta contracts.
“They are going to be totally valuable contributors to our economy,” Levie said. “It’s all positive sum. It’s not taking a job from anybody else. It makes us more competitive.”
Trump’s $100,000 fee makes international hiring more of a spending game. Startup founders told Business Insider that the fee could kneecap their hiring in the talent wars, sending skilled international workers to Big Tech companies that could more easily afford the fee.
Levie’s final suggestion was to make sure the policy didn’t outprice smaller startups. A16z general partner Martin Casado said that Keith Rabois, Khosla Ventures’s managing director, had floated the idea of a $20,000 fee. “Let’s just go with Keith’s number,” Levie said.
“There’s a way to do that without sort of overly putting constraints in the system that make it so a startup wouldn’t be able to economically viably participate in this,” he said. “$100K per year would be at a point where startups would be directly impacted.”
