H-1B Filings Drop Sharply at Walmart and Banks After Trump Visa Fees

The Wayside Youth & Family Support Network has always struggled to find enough special education teachers in Massachusetts. For years the nonprofit relied on the H-1B visa program to recruit educators from Brazil, Mexico and Germany. That option effectively vanished last fall when the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new visas.

Today the organization has five unfilled teaching positions and has turned away a dozen students who needed its services. Sara McCabe, the group's president, described the situation in stark terms. The fee has closed the door for us, she said. Without enough instructors the school cannot open additional classes, leaving vulnerable children without the specialized support their families sought.

The Wayside story is not an outlier. Since September, when the $100,000 fee and related changes began rolling out, the Trump administration has fundamentally reordered the H-1B program. What was designed three decades ago as a flexible pipeline for skilled foreign workers has become markedly more expensive and restrictive. The burden has fallen hardest on smaller employers, nonprofits and rural hospitals that lack the cash reserves or legal teams to absorb the new costs. Larger corporations have simply filed far fewer applications.

Fresh Department of Labor data for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, covering October through December 2025, shows a sharp retreat by some of the country's biggest users of the program. Walmart submitted only 312 certified H-1B applications during that period. The total represents more than a 50 percent drop from roughly 860 applications 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 across industries that once treated the visa as a routine staffing tool.

Wall Street firms posted similar declines overall. The largest financial institutions filed 10 percent fewer certified H-1B and related applications than in the comparable period the previous year. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase both cut their petitions noticeably. Citigroup was an exception, increasing its filings under chief executive Jane Fraser. The mixed results suggest some institutions are still willing to pay the higher price for specialized technical roles while others are rethinking their dependence on foreign talent altogether. Industry analysts note that rapid advances in artificial intelligence may be accelerating that reassessment, reducing demand for certain coding and data positions that once drove H-1B hiring.

The uneven impact is the defining feature of the new landscape. Large corporations can absorb six-figure fees on a limited number of applications or shift toward domestic hiring and automation. Nonprofits and smaller providers cannot. Rural hospitals that have used the program to staff nursing shortages now face the same prohibitive math as Wayside. The result is a quiet but profound shift in who gets access to the visa system. The program that once spread benefits across a wide range of employers is increasingly reserved for those with the deepest pockets.

The administration has framed the changes as a necessary correction. During his campaign President Trump promised to protect American workers and curb what he called the abuse of guest-worker programs. Raising the price of entry was presented as a straightforward way to reduce volume and prioritize higher-skilled, higher-paid roles. Yet the early evidence shows disruption in sectors that are not the usual targets of such criticism. Special education classrooms, community health clinics and nonprofit service providers do not fit the stereotype of tech giants displacing American engineers. Their inability to hire has immediate human consequences: students turned away, patients with longer wait times, programs scaled back.

The H-1B program has always been contentious, criticized from the left for depressing wages in some occupations and from the right for displacing domestic workers. The latest changes appear to satisfy neither side fully. Corporate filings are down sharply, suggesting the fee is achieving its goal of curbing volume. At the same time the collateral damage to essential public services raises questions about whether the policy was calibrated to the real-world needs of schools, hospitals and social service agencies.

For organizations like Wayside the damage is already done. McCabe and her staff are now scrambling to find alternative recruitment channels that do not exist at the scale they require. The dozen students turned away will likely wait months or never receive the specialized instruction the school was prepared to offer. Similar stories are emerging from rural medical centers and other nonprofits that once viewed the H-1B program as a lifeline rather than a luxury.

As more quarterly data arrives the full picture will sharpen. What is already clear is that the Trump administration's overhaul has produced a smaller, more expensive and more stratified visa system. Major retailers and banks are dialing back. Nonprofits and schools that serve some of society's most vulnerable populations are effectively locked out. The fee that was intended to protect American labor has instead restricted the labor pool available to those who care for American children who need it most.