H-1B fees hike: U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a widespread immigration crackdown since taking office in January. Restructuring the H-1B visa program is the next stage, and it represents one of the biggest attempts to modify temporary work visas to date.
Since its beginning in 1990, the H-1B visa program has been a part of the path for numerous business and technology leaders, despite the proposed reform and fee hike.
A list of prominent corporate executives with H-1B visas can be found here.
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Elon Musk (Tesla)
CEO of Tesla and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is not only a recipient of an H-1B visa but also a well-known advocate of the program.
Musk, who was born in South Africa, came to the United States in 1992 to study at the University of Pennsylvania. After attending Stanford, he left to begin his business career in Silicon Valley.
Musk has said that the H-1B visa is the primary reason he, along with many important people who founded SpaceX, Tesla, and many other businesses that bolstered America, are in the United States, even though some details of his early visa status remain unknown.
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Satya Nadella (Microsoft)
The chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, was born and raised in India and has a peculiar visa background. He first obtained a green card in 1990 and has stayed in the US ever since. Later, he surrendered it for his wife’s immigration by applying for an H-1B visa.
In hindsight, the notion that you must forfeit your green card to obtain an H-1B is absurd. In a 2017 interview with CNBC, Nadella stated, “Therefore, let us actually implement the reform so that it benefits us, both our competitiveness and our security.”
In 2017, on the “Make Me Smart” podcast, Nadella discussed the H-1B visa program and defended it as a source of highly skilled workers that helped Microsoft remain competitive globally. However, during the Trump administration, he also expressed support for an executive order that aimed to review the program for potential abuses.
Eric Yuan (Zoom)
Zoom’s founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, arrived in the US on an H-1B visa from China in 1997. According to a 2020 Cloud Giant podcast, Yuan was sponsored by Webex, a video conferencing firm that was ultimately acquired by Cisco Systems, but he was only approved after nine attempts.
Although Yuan hasn’t discussed the H-1B visa program in great detail in public, he told CNBC in 2019 that the US has a welcoming immigration policy.
Former H-1B visa holder Jeffrey Skoll, the founding president of eBay and current philanthropist and chairman of Capricorn Investment Group, has advocated for certain modifications and defended the program.
Being Canadian, he attended Stanford University in America after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1987. In 1996, he was granted an H-1B visa, which enabled him to begin working for eBay and Pierre Omidyar, the company’s founder.
In an X post, he stated, “Even though I had graduated from Stanford Business School and worked with Pierre Omidyar on [a student work visa] while we built eBay from scratch, for me personally it was a life [and] death fight to get and keep an H-1B visa.”
Ullal Jayshree (Arista Networks)
Born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Delhi, Jayshree Ullal is the CEO of cloud networking business Arista Networks. At the age of sixteen, she relocated to the United States and enrolled at San Francisco State University.
She began working at prestigious tech companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco after earning her master’s degree from Santa Clara University.
A spokesperson of the CEO had previously informed Forbes that Ullal had received an H-1B visa at some point during that time.