H-1B Filings Drop Sharply at Walmart, Goldman Sachs After New Visa Fees

The Trump administration’s decision to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas has produced an immediate and uneven contraction in the program that supplies skilled foreign workers to American employers. Nonprofits and schools that serve vulnerable populations have been effectively locked out, while even some of the country’s largest corporations have filed far fewer applications in the first hard data since the fee took effect last September.

Sara McCabe, president of the Wayside Youth & Family Support Network in Massachusetts, described the new reality in stark terms. The nonprofit runs a private special-education school that has long struggled to recruit qualified teachers locally. It has turned to the H-1B program to hire educators from Brazil, Mexico and Germany. After the fee was introduced, those options vanished. The school now has five open teaching positions and has turned away a dozen students who sought to enroll because it cannot staff additional classes.

“The $100,000 fee has closed the door for us,” McCabe said.

Her account, reported by The New York Times, illustrates a broader pattern. The H-1B program, created three decades ago to let employers hire foreign workers in specialty occupations when qualified Americans cannot be found, once served a wide range of institutions. Hospitals, rural clinics, consulting firms and small manufacturers all participated. The Trump administration’s fee has produced what the Times described as a fundamental shift in who can benefit. Smaller employers, nonprofits and rural hospitals have been hit hardest because they cannot absorb the sudden cost. Larger companies have more flexibility but many are also pulling back.

Department of Labor data for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, covering October through December 2025, offers the first clear snapshot of the policy’s impact. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, submitted 312 certified H-1B applications during that period. The total represents a drop of more than half from roughly 860 applications filed in the same quarter a year earlier and is about 40 percent below the level from two years ago. The retail giant’s retreat mirrors a broader slowdown in technology-related hiring that has now reached even non-tech sectors.

Wall Street shows a similar but uneven reaction. Filings fell at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase compared with the prior year, while Citigroup increased its petitions. Across the largest financial firms, certified H-1B and related applications declined by roughly 10 percent. Banks have used the visas to expand technical teams that build trading platforms, risk models and cybersecurity systems. Some analysts suggest the rise of artificial intelligence may reduce future demand for certain roles, but the new fee clearly added friction even for institutions that can afford it.

The contrast between large and small users is striking. A rural hospital seeking a single specialist or a nonprofit school like Wayside cannot treat the six-figure fee as a routine cost of recruitment. The Times reported that many such organizations have simply stopped participating. The result is not an abstract tightening of immigration policy but concrete service reductions: special-education students turned away, medical shifts left understaffed, and training programs scaled back.

The fee was rolled out in September as part of a suite of Trump administration changes intended to make the program more expensive and, in the president’s framing, more protective of American workers. Yet the early evidence suggests the policy is not uniformly protecting anyone. Instead it is reallocating access. Companies with the deepest pockets retain some ability to participate, while mission-driven organizations that fill genuine labor shortages in education and health care find themselves excluded. Walmart’s sharp decline, despite its vast resources, indicates that even profitable corporations are reassessing the economics when each new hire now carries a six-figure federal surcharge.

Supporters of the changes argue that high fees will encourage employers to train and hire domestically. Critics counter that the policy ignores documented shortages in fields such as special education, nursing and certain technical roles. The data now emerging shows the debate is no longer theoretical. Applications are down sharply in the opening months of the new regime. Schools are already limiting enrollment. Hospitals that relied on the program to serve underserved areas face harder choices.

The H-1B program has always been controversial, criticized both for alleged abuse by outsourcing firms and for legitimate gaps it fills in the domestic labor market. The Trump administration’s intervention has not resolved that tension. It has simply raised the price of entry so high that many of the original users can no longer reach the door. As more quarterly data are released, the full scope of the shift will become clearer. For now the human costs are already visible in classrooms where teachers cannot be hired and in communities where essential services are quietly shrinking.

The administration has signaled further tightening of legal immigration pathways. The early returns from the H-1B fee suggest those policies are producing rapid behavioral change among employers. Whether that change ultimately strengthens the American workforce or simply leaves gaps that cannot be filled quickly remains an open and urgent question. For organizations like Wayside Youth & Family Support Network, the question has already been answered in the form of empty desks and disappointed families.