The number is one hundred thousand dollars. That is what it costs to close a legal door that was open. Donald Trump set the price. He called it protection.
In September 2025, the president issued a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas — the program admitting 65,000 highly skilled foreign workers annually, with another 20,000 for holders of advanced degrees. Before the proclamation, employers typically paid about $2,000 to $5,000. The fee does not apply to foreign citizens already in the United States on student visas.
Twenty Democratic state attorneys general sued. On 8 June, a federal judge struck it down as an unlawful tax Congress never authorized. The administration appealed. On Friday, a three-judge panel of the First Circuit declined to halt the ruling, finding the administration had not shown it was likely to succeed.
The stated justification was that the H-1B program had been exploited — that employers brought in foreign workers to replace, not supplement, American labor. As if a $100,000 wall were a scalpel and not a sledgehammer.
Few employers have paid the fee since it was instituted.
Donald, few employers paid because the fee was not a fee. A fee is something you pay and then proceed. What you built was a wall — a financial wall, erected without Congress, aimed at people who cannot vote you out, who cannot lobby, who are not yet here because you priced them out of arriving.
You are a man who prices human beings out of their lives and calls it a fee. That is what you are. You did not make a difficult choice. You did not balance competing interests. You signed a number that closed a door on people who had already said yes to the work, and you felt nothing, because they are not people to you. They are numbers on a page. They are a crowd you can point to when you need applause. You are not protecting American workers. You are building a wall out of other people’s futures and calling it a policy. You are small, Donald. The number you signed is larger than your understanding of what it does to a human body.
The software engineer in Hyderabad has been awake since September. His employer offered him the job. The petition was filed. The lawyers were paid. His mother sold the last of her gold — not for your fee, for the original application, the $5,000 the system used to ask, because that is what mothers in Hyderabad do when their children are leaving.
Your proclamation added $95,000. Not phased in. Not negotiated with the Congress the Constitution gives power over immigration. Signed by you in September, while the man in Hyderabad was sleeping, because it was morning where you were and nighttime where he was.
Your hand did not shake when you signed it. But there is a tightness in your chest now that was not there before September — a pressure behind the sternum that does not respond to the photograph or the applause or the next rally. You feel it when the room is quiet. You feel it when the briefing is over and the door closes and there is no one left to perform for. It is the weight of the number settling into a body that was built to sign documents, not to carry what they do.
Your throat closes when you swallow. The mothers in Hyderabad cannot swallow either. Their daughters sold gold for a future you signed away with a pen. Your jaw aches at breakfast. The morning report has hollowed something behind your sternum that no morning report will fill.
The woman in Lagos is thirty-one. Eleven years of training. A research position at a university that has already published her name in the department directory. Her laboratory bench is waiting. Her grant cannot absorb $100,000. Her chest is tight. Her breath is short. There is a number in her mouth, Donald, but it is not yours — it is the number of years she trained, and it tastes like nothing now. It tastes like the inside of a lock.
Her sleep has changed since September. She lies down and the number is there. It does not leave when she closes her eyes. It does not negotiate. It is the sound of a lock turning.
You lie down too. The difference is that when you close your eyes, you see a signature. When she closes her eyes, she sees a laboratory that will not exist. Your sleep is the sleep of a man who has never had to count what his signatures cost. Hers is the sleep of a woman who counted every year and found that a man in a building in Washington counted less than she did.
This is not the only wall. The administration is building a $100,000 bond requirement for green-card applicants. The administration has capped foreign student visas at four years. The architecture is the same each time: price them out, shorten the window, shrink the pathway. The rhetoric is the same: protecting American workers. The targets are the same: people who cannot fight back because they are not citizens and have no vote and no lobby and no senator to call.
The child whose mother told her in May that they were moving to America, who told her classmates, who packed her own backpack with the notebook and the colored pencils — that child does not know yet. Her mother is doing the math at the kitchen table. The kitchen table is where these decisions land when you have a table and a child and a man in a building who signed a number.
Your grandchildren were born inside it. The wall is for other people’s children. You built it with a signature while the cameras were on, and the people who cheered believe that a woman from Lagos is why their factory closed. The factory closed for other reasons. You know the reasons. Naming them would not produce the applause.
Few employers paid the fee. The fee was never meant to be paid. The fee was the sound of a lock turning from the inside.
“For I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” Matthew 25:35
The man in Hyderabad is still awake. The woman in Lagos is still awake. They are not strangers to themselves. They are strangers to the country that offered them work and then priced them out of arriving.
The proclamation does not name them. It names a program number, a visa category, a fee amount. It does not name the mother who sold the gold. It does not name the child with the backpack. It does not name the woman whose sleep has changed.
“Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” Matthew 25:45
The fee was not a fee. The fee was a wall. The wall is still standing.