How Trump alarmed (and tried to calm) CEOs with his new $100,000 H-1B visa fee

It was a roller coaster weekend for businesses trying to understand how they would be impacted by President Trump’s proclamation mandating a $100,000 fee on visas for skilled foreign workers.

The executive order focused on H1-B visas was unveiled and signed after markets closed Friday with statements from the Oval Office that led to a weekend of scrambling to figure out how it might change the lives of the estimated 730,000 holders of this type of temporary non-immigrant visa for skilled workers.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, standing beside Trump on Friday, even described the overall goal of the order as making this widely relied upon visa “not economic” in nearly all instances.

But then, as the confusion mounted, Trump’s team offered an apparent 180 degree turn on key specifics, such as whether this fee will be an annual one and whether it will ever be paid by existing visa holders.

The final effects are still coming into focus, but the changing messaging over the weekend appears to have calmed fears. Markets opened Monday morning with the tech sector — an industry heavily reliant on this program — only moderately down.

A possible bottom line amid the noise came from Terry Haines of Pangaea Policy, who noted Sunday night in a note to clients that these visa rules are likely to remain “murky for months” but said the larger context for tech at least is “a blip compared to the many tech positives.”

But it’s clearly going to be an ongoing issue with a range of top companies — from Google (GOOG) to Amazon (AMZN) to Walmart (WMT) to JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — each sponsoring thousands of these visas, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The confusion over the weekend centered around two specifics of the order, including whether this new fee would be an annual one and whether it would apply to existing visa holders.

The message from Trump’s team Friday in the Oval Office appeared to be a definitive yes on both accounts.

White House staff secretary William Scharf handed Trump the order calling the H1-B program “abused” and explaining “what this proclamation will do is raise the fee that companies pay to sponsor H1-B applicants to $100,000.”

The current ​​H1-B visa program includes a range of (much smaller) fees, some of which are paid initially and some that must be paid on a repeating basis annually .

Lutnick then repeatedly described the $100,000 fee as an annual one, saying at one point “$100,000 a year for H1-B visas” which could be repeated for 6 years.

The larger goal of the order — he said — was to make the costs of retaining foreign workers for a longer period of time so costly that it would force companies to at least eventually turn to US citizens.

The order itself wasn’t fully clear on the subject — saying these types of non-immigrant visa would be restricted “except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.”

But by Saturday, the White House message and interpretation of the order had flipped.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered on social media that “this is NOT an annual fee” and that it will only apply to new applicants and will “first apply in the next upcoming lottery cycle.”

That message was accompanied by letters offering a similar message from the US Customs and Border Patrol and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to “set the record straight.”

But these clarifications came after hours of confusion, including notices that reportedly were sent to employees at Microsoft, Amazon and JPMorgan saying any visa holder outside the United States should rush back to the US before the new rules took effect Sunday morning.

Another aspect of the order that gained notice over the weekend was around how many exceptions would be granted.

Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, pointed out language in the order that made clear any fees could be waived at the Trump administration’s discretion if it is determined “in the [Homeland] Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest.”

As Wolfers, a frequent Trump critic, put it: “Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.”

The entire mix led to a sense Monday morning that the impact would in the end perhaps not be as far reaching as initially thought.

Notable was Elon Musk, who once promised “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Musk not only didn’t weigh in on this latest development publicly — even while weighing in on dozens of other subjects over the weekend — he saw Trump in person for the first time in months as he shook hands with Trump during a memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona.

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow’s stock prices

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance