Trump Proclaims America Shall Sell H-1B Visas for $100k And Residency For A Million
It's pay to play in America!
It’s chaos every day with this administration, and deciding what to pay attention to is like triaging victims of a bus crash! It seems like TrumpCo is doing self-sabotage, with all those tariffs that are predictably going to plunge the US (and probably the world) into recession. Why does it seem like Donny Two-Dolls is trying to wreck everything? Even white ethno-states need farming and industry!
But the regime, driven by the ideology of Stephen Miller and the Project 2025 Mandate / Seven Mountains Christian-dominionist types, seems heck-bent on accelerating economic collapse to consolidate power into a handful of mega-companies. That makes them easier to control, so they can better help build the new Godly kingdom to come! The destroy-and-consolidate is maybe most obvious in the media, but it’s happening in tech, farming, and industry, too, because everything a game to the former reality gameshow-host: Last Oligarchs Standing.
Viewed through that cultish lens, it all makes more sense. Like, say, Trump’s abrupt and shambolic royal PROCLAMATION on Friday night that starting Sunday, H-1B visas shall now cost company sponsors $100,000 a year, instead of the $2,500-$5,000 they used to cost, with guidance to come later about how the system would actually work. And he announced a separate “gold card” visa for individuals who can afford to pay $1 million dollars for US permanent residency. Everything’s pay-to-play in Trump’s America now, baby!
So Friday afternoon, panic ensued, with foreign-worker plane-ticket-holders disembarking at the announcement, unsure they’d be able to return to the US, and companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft warning their H-1B holder employees not to leave and ones overseas to return while they scrambled to figure out WTF was going on.
This is why law by the whimsy of royal decree is a bad idea.
And then later that very same day ,Karoline Leavitt said that the proclamation only meant NEW visa holders, and it was a one-time fee, even though Lutnick JUST said the opposite. Do those people even talk to each other? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯!
And does that mean there will now be an unlimited number of H-1B visas? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯! And hey, can Trump even do that? Aren’t stuff like, say, visa requirements and tariffs supposed to be the job of Congress to figure out? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The Supreme Court is mulling it over, which is never a good thing.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump realized that whoops, he needs foreign companies to keep investing in the US, after causing an international incident by locking up more than 300 Korean workers for Hyundai and LG in Georgia for eight days in inhumane conditions, even though they were here legally and doing the right things. And there, by the way, to assemble factories with Korean autonomous robots so advanced that even high school dropouts from Southeast Georgia can operate them, as part of a deal Joe Biden made in 2022 after Republican Governor Brian Kemp had been begging Korea to invest for years. And robot-overlord jobs is exactly what Howard Lutnick himself had said he wanted for the young men of America!
What’s more, most of the detained Korean workers had B1/B2 visas, which are for short-term consulting. And that is exactly what they were doing! Being paid on a short-term basis by a foreign company to set up the factory and train Americans to run it. But none of that mattered, because Stephen Miller/ Kristi Noem/ Corey Lewandowski made a quota of 3,000 arrests a day for Todd Lyons of ICE to fill, OR ELSE YER FIRED.
Thus, ICE arrested 300 people at the factory when they only had warrants for four, without even checking any of their paperwork, and then detained them for eight days in substandard conditions while they tried to figure out what they’d arrested them for. And eventually DHS declared that the B1/B2s were the wrong visas, and the workers were supposed to have H-B1s, instead. But there’s a cap on the number of those, and less than 10 percent of people who apply every year get one.
So, with the factory still closed, its workers along with thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of others driven back to their home countries in fear, the administration rubbed all of its brain cells together trying to figure out how to solve the dilemma of desperately needing foreign investment and help from the same people they’ve been screaming are inferior vermin. They turned to the time-work concession of the racist forefathers, some handpicked ones can be the good ones. How do you know who the good ones are?
Why, money! And fealty to the regime, of course, that goes for everybody.
So here is the solution, we guess, until they clarify or change their minds again: Companies can have all of the H-1Bs they want, as long as they pay the bounty on top of the billions they’re already invested. Never mind that Hyundai and LG signed that deal to build the factory three years ago, and Trump is going back on the deal that they (and every other company) thought they had! Now they must pony up an extra $30 million if they don’t want their investment eaten by kudzu. That is, if Hyundai/LG can even find 300 workers willing to go back to Georgia.
This is only good news for every other country in the world, and for the American companies who can afford to buy two whole Tom Homans per foreign employee. Like, the Elon Musk Robot, Rocket and Self-Driving Car concern, or the Ellison boys’ servers-to-nuts emerging media conglomerate.
Ironically, if it’s going to be unlimited pay-for-play, well, that will mean more immigrants. Even at $100k, a well-trained and more controllable employee, scared to be sent home should they ever complain about anything, is a deal for companies who can afford one!
And derp, after months of concepts of frameworks of deals, still no deal with China on those RARE EARTH MINERALS that they control the world’s biggest supply of! Companies need them to make high-tech stuff, and a Ford Explorer factory in Illinois has already been shut since June for want of the minerals. However shall US companies make all of those AI chips, rockets to the moon, ships, self-driving cars, weapons, Boeing planes, whatevers etc to compete with China and the world without them? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯! Trump either did or didn’t think about that before 145 percent tariffing China and yanking the visas of Chinese students.
Vagueness! Chaos! Uncertainty! Isolation! In MAGA-world, this all makes perfect sense.
[New York Times archive link/ Bloomberg archive link]
Did y’all know that most of the screws sold in the United States are made in South Korea?
These people are screwing us out of our supply of *screws.* That could be a problem soon.
Can we sell OUR residency for a million?