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President Trump’s new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas is simply a “rounding error” for tech companies, the CEO of a prominent recruitment company has claimed.
Shahriar Tajbakhsh is the Iranian-born CEO of MetaviewAI, which sells software to help automate job interviews and recruits workers from India, which is one of the main beneficiaries of the H-1B program.
“If you’re on an H-1B visa and your company doesn’t value you enough to pay the $100k, check out https://m.careers to see if any of our roles might be a fit,” Tajbakhsh wrote on X.
“I’m seeing many companies from other countries using this as an opportunity to say, ‘Come work in country X.’ That feels a bit desperate to me. Instead, come work with the @MetaviewAI— right here in San Francisco — where $100k is a rounding error compared to the value each member of our team creates. Our team is ready to move fast and get to an offer/no-offer decision on any candidate within 24 hours of first contact (assuming you can give us 4-5 hours of your time for interviews).”
After referring to the massively increased fee as a “rounding error,” the CEO joked in a second post that it should be made a fee “per day,” adding the he would “set up a recurring payment.”
Feelings ran high on social media in response to the posts.
“The one-time $100k fee was too light, and they’re wagging it in our faces,” wrote one user.
“If it’s a rounding error, raise the fee to $1 million!” said another.
The H-1B visa system has been a target for the Trump administration as part of its wide-ranging immigration and labor reforms.
In December, potential reforms to the H-1B visa scheme led to an acrimonious public row. Ill-advised comments from Vivek Ramaswamy about Americans’ failings in the job market—including a bizarre suggestion that Americans spend too much time idolizing Zach and Slater from Saved by the Bell and had too many sleepovers when they could be studying—led to his removal from DOGE and also caused the first open break between Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
Critics of the H-1B program have argued that it allows companies to suppress wages, especially in the tech sector, and disadvantages American workers.
According to government data, India was by far the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas last year, accounting for 71% of all approved visas, with China accounting for 11.7%.
In the first half of 2025, Amazon.com and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta Platforms were granted over 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each.
At the beginning of last month, it was announced that close to 200 companies were being investigated for abusing the H-1B system.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer said 175 investigations were now taking place into companies using the H-1B system.
The enforcement initiative, called “Project Firewall,” began in September, when President Trump announced the addition of a $100,000 fee for H-1B petitions.
“We have over 175 investigations that we’ve opened, and for the first time in history, as a Secretary of Labor, I have signed those investigations personally, because we want to make sure that these companies are not abusing. We want to make sure that they’re protecting the American worker, first by one: posting the jobs available to Americans.
“Two: if they do need to use the H-1B, Visa Program, within the program, we have to make sure that they’re paying those fair wages, not to depress the American wages. And if that employee leaves that company, they have to make sure that they’re posting that with the government so that we know where those employers have gone and those employees.
“So it’s been somewhat of a problem, but we want to protect the American worker first, and Project Firewall will do that. We will be actively investigating these companies if they’re getting in the way of protecting foreign workers over American ones.”
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