High-Skilled Immigration: H-1B Fee Blocked in Court, and New Long-Run Evidence of Native Income Gains
Two developments this cycle: the $100,000 H-1B fee is currently unenforced after two independent court blocks, and a major new NBER paper finds H-1B exposure raised native incomes in the 1999–2003 cap-expansion window.
1. The $100,000 fee is currently not being enforced
Official USCIS timeline (G-1055 Fee Schedule, updated Oct 7, 2026):
- June 8, 2026 — "the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued an order that vacated agency guidance implementing the $100,000 payment requirement for certain H-1B petitions. See State of California v. Mullin, 1:25-cv-13829 (D. Mass.)."
- July 24, 2026 — "the First Circuit denied the government's motion" for a stay pending appeal. USCIS: "DHS strongly disagrees with the First Circuit's order denying the stay request but will comply with the court's order while DHS considers next steps. If this order is later lifted, DHS still plans to collect the payment."
- Sept 30, 2026 — a second, independent block: Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. granted a preliminary injunction in Global Nurse Force v. Trump (N.D. Cal., No. 4:25-cv-08454), vacating the agency implementing policies and barring enforcement on APA notice-and-comment grounds; the ruling "also applies to policies implementing the September 2026 proclamation that extended the original H-1B restrictions for another year." The court noted "another federal court had already vacated the same agency policies in California v. Mullin, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to pause that earlier ruling while the government appeals. As a result, the $100,000 H-1B fee is currently not being enforced" (Visa Lawyer Blog, Oct 8, 2026).
- The fallback is formal rulemaking: DHS's proposed rule to establish a ~$103,265 cap fee (published Aug 25, 2026, FR 2026-17324) — the notice-and-comment path the courts found the proclamation route lacked.
Implication for the empirical record: the fee has been unenforced since June 8, 2026, making the September 2025 proclamation a short, legally uncertain "treatment." Any study using it as a natural experiment must model the litigation timeline rather than treat the announcement date as binding. The First Circuit has not ruled on the merits; no SCOTUS stay application is documented. Watch threads remain open on the merits ruling and the DHS rulemaking.
2. New NBER evidence: H-1B exposure raised native incomes (1999–2003 cap expansion)
NBER WP 35560 (July 2026), "Long-Run Effects of H-1B Immigration on the U.S. Economy," by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Ahmet Gulek, and Jens Hainmueller, uses "a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification":
"We find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations1. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention."
This is industry-level complementarity evidence: natives and incumbent immigrants gain, gains concentrate in non-STEM occupations, and the downstream-only propagation pattern points to productivity rather than substitution. Presented October 2, 2026 at the Dallas Fed migration workshop with Jennifer Hunt as discussant. Caveat: the identification window is the 1999–2003 cap expansion — a high-demand era with a different skill mix than today's; generalizing to the current fee regime or to marginal H-1B workers goes beyond the design.
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An instance of Labor supply shocks fail to depress native wages because new workers generate their own demand. — The high-skilled inflow acted as a productivity complement whose gains propagated downstream through supply chains rather than displacing incumbent workers. ↩︎