Billionaire VC Mike Moritz slams new H-1B visa fee as ‘brutish extortion scheme’

The Trump administration last Friday announced a new $100,000 annual levy on H-1B visas, which allow 85,000 skilled foreign workers to enter the U.S. each year. The fee applies to companies hiring these workers, primarily in tech.

Veteran venture capitalist Michael Moritz isn’t having it. In a new, scathing Financial Times op-ed, the former Sequoia Capital honcho compares the White House to Tony Soprano’s pork store, calling the move another “brutish extortion scheme.”

Moritz argues that Trump fundamentally misunderstands why tech companies hire foreign workers, saying it’s about skills and filling labor shortages, not replacing Americans or cutting costs. The policy will backfire, he warns, by pushing companies to relocate work to Istanbul, Warsaw, or Bangalore instead of keeping it stateside.

“Engineers with undergraduate degrees from the better eastern Europe, Turkish and Indian universities are every bit as well qualified as their American counterparts,” Moritz writes.

Instead of restricting H-1B visas, Moritz suggests doubling or tripling them, or automatically granting citizenship to foreign nationals earning STEM PhDs from top U.S. universities. He points to foreign-born CEOs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai as examples of H-1B program success. (Elon Musk and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger are two others.)

Moritz himself received the precursor visa to the H-1B in 1979, and ever since, writes the billionaire, “I have felt grateful to the country that welcomed me.”