Billionaire VC Mike Moritz Slams New H-1B Visa Fee as a ‘Brutish Extortion Scheme’

The Trump administration has unveiled a steep new policy: a $100,000 annual levy on H-1B visas, which each year allow 85,000 highly skilled foreign professionals to work in the United States. The fee, announced last Friday, will be charged to companies employing these workers — most of them in the tech sector.

Not everyone is taking the news quietly. Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist and former Sequoia Capital partner, sharply criticized the decision in a fiery Financial Times op-ed, likening the administration’s approach to “Tony Soprano’s pork store” and denouncing the measure as a “brutish extortion scheme.”

According to Moritz, the White House has misread the true purpose of the H-1B program. He argues that tech companies hire foreign talent not to undercut American jobs, but to access skills that are in short supply domestically. Imposing such fees, he warns, will only drive businesses to move jobs abroad to places like Istanbul, Warsaw, or Bangalore, instead of investing further in the U.S.

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

Rather than restrict access, he urges expanding the program — suggesting that the U.S. should double or triple the number of H-1B visas or even grant automatic citizenship to STEM PhD graduates from top American universities. He highlights how the program has paved the way for global tech leaders such as Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), and Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder).

Moritz also shared his personal connection: he himself entered the U.S. in 1979 on the precursor to the H-1B visa. Since then, he wrote, “I have felt grateful to the country that welcomed me.”