H1B Visa: The $100,000 Fee That’s Pushing U.S. Companies Overseas

Moving Abroad Resources:

👉 Moving Abroad Relocation Roadmap Guidebook that walks you through the five phases of moving abroad ($27): https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/relocate

👉 Moving Abroad Relocation Blueprint Course which offers step by step guidance on everything from choosing the right country to immigration to taxes and everything in between: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/blueprint

👉 Want us to handle the details of your move abroad? Apply for our white-glove relocation services here: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/consult

👉 Free Moving to Mexico Guide: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/mexico

👉 Free Moving Abroad Checklist: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/abroad 

Remote Work and Online Income Resources:

👉 Expat Income Accelerator course which shows you the multiple ways you can make money globally based on our 15+ years of experience in online business, investing internationally and living in multiple countries: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/income

👉 Get Your First High Paying Client Online Bootcamp which walks you through the first four foundational steps of creating and monetizing an online business based on 15+ years of experience in online business: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/firstclient-yt

👉 YouTube Mastery Workshop which shows you how we’ve built two YouTube channels that bring clients and passive income from digital course sales (including turning Entrepreneur Expat into a six-figure business in six months): https://www.YouTubeMasteryWorkshop.com

👉LinkedIn Mastery Workshop which shows you how to use LinkedIn to find remote work, clients and connect with recruiters based on Justin’s experience building a six-figure business and finding remote work on LinkedIn: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/linkedin

👉 Free Make Money From Anywhere Guide: https://www.entrepreneurexpat.com/money-guide 

V I D E O S    T O    W A T C H    N E X T :

Online Business Tips to Working and Traveling In Mexico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zGH0voCyOc&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_IA6s3KvB_g9Cc9Ze1eji8j&index=2

Moving to Mexico: 10 Reasons Why We Chose to Live in Guadalajara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK23vD8_xjc&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_LAY7UV78YMgms-f2e1UcwN&index=23

Tips for Moving Overseas: Top 5 Remote Work Skills That Make Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFzjCrlNAL8&list=PLh3xKhkMgH_IA6s3KvB_g9Cc9Ze1eji8j

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Transcript

Justin Keltner: 0:36

Trump's$100,000 fee for H one B Visa Applicants has now gone into effect and if you're a US business owner that's looking to hire talent and track talent from different countries, this visa fee is a game changer, but not in a good way. In this video, we're gonna talk about exactly what this H one B fee is, how it works, and why it's going to change the landscape of both business and employment in the us. And we're in for a little rollercoaster here. This is not going to be what people think. Hi, I'm Justin Keltner and on this channel Entrepreneur, expat, we talk about everything to do with global business, global diversification and building the life, the business, and the lifestyle of your dreams in a different country. If that's something that you're interested in, if you're looking for global investment tips, if you're looking for opportunities abroad, if you're looking at getting. A second residency or even a second passport, you're definitely gonna wanna hit that subscribe button and that notification bell. We're coming out with multiple videos a week, talking about all of those different things. And if you're a business owner in the US and you're like. There's some crazy stuff happening right now, and I wanna start to maybe build my Plan B or even potentially relocate my business overseas, and you've got a million dollars or more in net assets, then you definitely want to book a call with our team so that we can talk about those things. One-on-one and give you personalized attention. You can book that call@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult. Or if not, you can also check out all the free resources below this video. So what we're gonna dive into today specifically, is how this H one B fee impacts businesses in the us, how it impacts. The talent pool and specifically what some alternative options are. A lot of people now that this is passed are saying. You know what? It's way too expensive for us to pay this fee. It just doesn't make any sense financially. And then on top of that, they're not able to find the talent that they're looking for in the US or perhaps it's not competitive, or perhaps there's so much regulation and other red tape around hiring people in the United States or even. In Canada or elsewhere, right? That we're dealing with this all over, especially the west. So what are some alternative options? So we're also gonna talk about how to legally and effectively hire talent in different countries, specifically in Mexico, so that you can either work with Mexicos here that are already in Mexico, or perhaps even bring in talent from other countries to live and work in Mexico. Like a ton of businesses in the US and all. Over the world have done. So what has changed? What is this new fee that's been introduced as of September of 2025? On September 19th, 2025, Trump signed a proclamation that new H one B petitions filed after September 21st must include a hundred thousand dollars payment by the sponsoring employer. As a clarification, this is a one-time fee for new petitions. It's not an annual fee, but this is still a really big chunk of change to any employer, especially those that are hiring multiple people Under this H one B Visa program, it applies to petitions for workers that are outside of the us. Entering the US under that H one B program, there are some exemptions or gray areas. This includes renewals, this includes existing H one B holders, national interests and things like that. There's, there's several things that are under dispute, but what this really does is it makes trying to bring new foreign talent into the US through H one B uncertainly. It makes trying to bring new talent into the US through this H one B program. Extremely expensive and also legally uncertain. And obviously the goal of this program was to try to get us employers to hire talent locally, but in a lot of cases that's just not viable. And here's why. This is actually pushing companies to hire remotely instead. What it seems like is happening increasingly more is that companies are outsourcing instead of bringing people to the us. In fact, this has been a trend for many, many years. You see call centers being outsourced, obviously to India. You call Delta or or Chase or whoever. You get a Bangladeshi or Indian or, or a Filipino person. On the other line, uh, perhaps even for developer talent, there's a lot of businesses that have entire teams in places like India and places like Pakistan. Instead of bringing those people. And this bill is now going to push talent, in other countries to just work in those other countries and from those other countries and push businesses to outsource all of those different things. So they're bringing the US operations to them. That's sort of the next best option. They're creating this remote and this distributed. Workforce. Of course, remote work avoids the visa issue completely if those workers are residing out of the US now, of course. And this is what we're gonna cover here in this video. Remote does not mean no rules. You must comply with local labor tax employment laws where the worker lives. We're not giving you any legal or professional advice here. This is just our opinion. Always consult your payroll, your accounting, your legal professionals if you have specific questions. And of course, if you want to help create a customized plan for relocating yourself, your family, and your business to Mexico or elsewhere. So that you can get out of all the craziness and all the red tape and all the political instability in the US or if you just want to dive in on the business topics specifically and get our advice and our team's advice. Don't forget to book that consult right here@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult. Now, from Mexico specifically where we help a lot of people start and grow companies, there are obviously additional constraints, additional protections under the teleworking Labor laws, so here are some of the legal models and best practices. The first one is that you hire people as independent contractors or freelancers. Of course, the pros to this is that the overhead is relatively low and that things are very flexible risks. Of course, just like in the US with the IRS, you don't want to have somebody that's actually a full-time employee in Mexico and treat them like a contractor, right? You can. You can risk misclassification and then. Be charged a lot in the same fees you would've paid before, plus more fees and other fines On top of that like penalties that those local authorities will impose if they end up reclassifying those people as employees. You must use clear contracts, you've gotta have clear contracts, local compliance, withholding and proof of employer status. Those are things that are important whenever you're hiring somebody in Mexico. If you are setting up an employee model via a local entity. That's one of the things that's very common. Now, you can actually set up a Mexican subsidiary or a branch. You can register with Mexican tax and labor authorities, and then you employ people directly under Mexican law. So you're covering things like social security benefits, severance, et cetera. And of course, you're also complying with. Telework laws here in Mexico, like the remote workspace needs to be documented and employer must cover certain expenses. This is typically better for larger organizations that have those sorts of HR resources to really cover all the different angles because if not, it gets really tricky. You really do have to have proper operations here in Mexico. You gotta make sure all your T's are dotted, all of your i's are. Your T's are crossed. Your i's are dotted. See? See, that's exactly the kind of problem you get into if you're not paying attention to the details. Now another alternative if you do want to classify them as full-time employees, if they're actually providing employee like services, but maybe you don't want to go through all the red tape of setting up your own organization or subsidiary in Mexico, is that you can have. An employee of record, an EOR, or a professional employer organization, or PEO, that EOR legally hires the worker in Mexico on your behalf. They handle things like payroll. They handle the benefits, they handle compliance and taxes, but you still retain operational control. You define the work and you manage the performance of those. Employees, and this tends to be the fastest, lowest risk route for US companies expanding abroad. Unless you're just using contractors and maybe you've got a few hours here, a few hours there, and you're not, you know, wanting to control like hours that they work and things like that. But in a lot of cases you do want to be very careful, like I mentioned before, not to misclassify contractors, uh, misclassify employees as contractors. Then an a further option is you can also have a hybrid or local contractor plus employment mix, so you can have contractors for freelance tasks and then convert them to full-time employees if you are looking to work with them full-time on a long-term basis. And you want to factor in things like work permits or immigration for foreign nationals in Mexico. Now, the cool thing is here in Mexico, all you need to do is set up that business, have the proper legal structure, and you could start issuing visas for foreigners. Let's say, uh, one, one example. Actually, we see a lot, and this is one of the reasons there's such great Indian food where we live in Guadalajara or, or close by now, we're, we're about an hour from Guadalajara. There's Indian restaurants popping up. Everywhere. And they have quite good food, I must say. And the reason is because there's a ton of people from India now coming here to Mexico to work. It's almost like Tech Nearshoring. Instead of these US and other international companies bringing people into their countries, where's there's a high cost of living, they're paying higher salaries, and now on top of it all, they've gotta pay this damn a hundred thousand dollars H one B Visa plan. They bring people to a lower cost. Country, just like Mexico, and they issue their visas there. There's a lot less red tape. You can have an employee up and running potentially in 30 to 60 days instead of the months or years that it takes to hire people and sponsor them on that H one B Visa program. And you're not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. You're paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's, it's a factor of 10 or less, right? It's nothing like the red tape that you'll face. In the us. So of course, if they want to work here from Mexico for your company, they need that proper authorization that that temporary residence and that work authorization. But you can very easily issue those work authorizations from your company, get them approved through immigration. They'll get that one year temporary resident visa that is renewable. And the great benefit for employees that wanna live here long term is that unlike some other countries like perhaps Columbia, where you might not get a direct path to citizenship or even permanent residence, if they have that renewable one year temporary residence here in Mexico and they renew it and they're working, let's say for year company for a total of about four years, they now can apply for permanent residence in Mexico. And you don't have to do anything else special for that. That's a great benefit because now somebody from India or somebody from another part of the world can come down here and live in Mexico, bring their family to Mexico, potentially have a better quality of life than maybe they did back home in India, and their entire family can have a path. To permanent residents and eventually Mexican citizenship if they so choose versus the US where it's much, much more complicated to do that, as you know, and if the remote hires are actually Mexican nationals, so if you're setting up shop here, you're hiring Mexican nationals, this is much less of a concern because they've already got that work authorization being Mexican national. So you can use a combination both of Mexican employees. And also people from other countries that now come and work and live here for your company. Now we're gonna talk about some key compliance and practical considerations to doing this. So number one is you've got what's called a permanent establishment risk. So if you do have employees in Mexico, then local tax authorities might argue that you have a permanent establishment, which does trigger corporate tax obligations. Another thing you've gotta bear in mind is labor protections and benefits. So the Mexican labor law is very protective of employees. It's a little bit more focused on employee protections than it is in employer protections. You need to make sure that you're always providing those mandatory benefits, including vacation, sometimes profit sharing, social security, and so much more for that, that employee model. And then telework laws in Mexico oblige you. As an employer to supply certain equipment covering part of their internet and maybe even their electricity if they're working from home. Make sure that you're inspecting the workspace, making sure that it's a good workspace to work from, that there are safety standards in place and things like that. This is why it's really important that you work with professionals. We do things like this all the time, so if you haven't already booked your concept below and you are a business owner. Or you're looking to start a business in Mexico, make sure that you book that consult@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult and we can analyze your unique situation and help you make sure that you're compliant with all of these different things and that you're also optimizing your tax situation across. Different countries. In addition to what I mentioned about the telework space, you've gotta make sure that you're processing payroll here properly. You are looking at things like withholding requirements just like you would be in the us. Contrary to popular belief, this is not just some wild, wild west free for all country where you can do whatever you want. There's, there's laws, there's systems that you need to make sure that you're compliant with. And if you're hiring people as employees. Then you're gonna have to have, as a corporation, a Mexican tax ID or RFC. And what you do when you form that corporation is you essentially become a persona morale under Mexican law. So you have, uh, a, a corporate registration that RFC, and you're gonna have to withhold income tax, social security, and other contributions. Now, if they're contractors, contractors must invoice you under Mexican tax rules. Typically they're going to register as a persona, which essentially means that they are independent contractors. There're there are individuals. They don't have a registered corporate entity, but they are contractors under Mexican law and they're gonna be invoicing you. They're typically gonna be sending you things like uras. So there's a system, unlike the US, where you just have a receipt if you wanna write something off. Here you have those proper CFDI invoices or uras that are interconnected. So you send an invoice and then the tax authority sees that invoice and then a company receives that invoice. So there's actually, uh, it's almost like a double ledger accounting system where everything is balanced out so that they keeps track of all of that tax activity within the country for proper enforcement. You also want to be aware. Of the contracts and of the local laws, and use contracts that conform to Mexican labor law. Obviously you're not doing contracts in English here. Under the US law, you're doing labor contracts, NDAs, and in some cases intellectual property assignments. Under Mexican law, you're gonna have to be careful with termination clauses and severance rights because a lot of those laws are very different like we mentioned before, than they are from somewhere like the US and factor in as well cultural and operational factors. So there's different. Sorts of holidays. For instance, in Mexico, there's different expectations in terms of the hours that somebody would work and overtime and things like that. And of course, if you are in a different time zone, make sure that those things are aligned. Uh, you're gonna wanna review communication norms because even though there is a very similar culture here in a lot of ways to the us, you're hiring people from a d. Country, a different culture, a different background. You wanna make sure that you're following those communication and cultural norms and expectations. And of course, you gotta be tapped into the local labor market dynamics. So what are current wages? Uh, how are you compensating people? What sorts of incentive structures and things like that are you offering to be competitive with other employees here? And then if you are exiting that business or exiting Mexico and that, that component of your, of your business. How do you do that? How do you scale down? How do you plan as you scale or exit without any legal surprises? Now we're gonna dive into some real world paths as well as case studies. From different types of businesses and how they might go about doing this. So one example is a US SaaS founder hires developers in Guadalajara. We see this all the time. They're hiring Mexicans for software engineering, for DevOps, for infrastructure management. Whether they have more operations in, in a place like Mexico that they're op operating infrastructure in, or they're just trying to get benefits from that nearshoring and from outsourcing of those positions. So they hire that employee in Guadalajara through an EOR, that employer of record, and then they scale the team without a US entity, another example would be a US FinTech that will use a mix, so maybe they use contractors for design work here in Mexico. They use employees for core engineering talent, converting those people to full-time employees when needed so that they can get that nice balance of cost savings and also compliance. And of course, us salaries are significantly higher than Mexican salaries. You might be able to find talent here for two to$3,000 per month or even less, where that same talent might cost$10,000 per month or more in the us. Plus you're dealing with that a hundred thousand dollars. H one B visa cost now. So it just kind of becomes a no brainer if, if you're a mid to large company, you are looking at how to do this in Mexico and how to do this in other countries. Because even when you factor in all of the local benefits that you're paying that might be slightly higher as a percentage than in the US and your employer of record fee and things like that, you're still saving a ton of money. And if you can deal with a little bit of red tape, if you can deal with navigating some of those cultural, uh, things and, and setting the. Systems upright to begin with in terms of communication and time zones and all that. There are huge, huge benefits to hiring talent in Mexico, or even bringing talent in from all sorts of other places in the world to live and work from somewhere like Mexico. They're in the, the similar time zone. They're not working from India where you've got like a nine to 12 hour gap or somewhere in the Middle East or in Pakistan. Right. They're, they're in a very similar time zone. There's overlap directly between US Pacific, all the way to US central time, so there's a ton of benefits. To be had from doing this so that a hundred KH one B visa, so that a hundred KH one B Visa is really tipping the scales now for a lot of US-based employers and they're making traditional visa routes to bring talent into the US so, so expensive. But Mexico is now in a unique position because a lot of Mexicans are gonna be hired now by US companies, and it's a more viable and scalable strategy in the long run. If you want help structuring your cross-border hiring or want our plug and play partners here in Mexico, that can help you get all of this established if you're a medium to large business or even if you're just. Starting and you're, you're looking at, hey, how do we get some contractors? How do we get some employees in Mexico to be able to do all of this without us having to tap in to workers from around the world coming to the US and having to sponsor them and everything else? Then you definitely wanna book that call@entrepreneurexpat.com slash consult, book that consult with our team. Now, if that isn't you, and maybe you're just watching this to inform yourself about what's going on with H one B or the laws or anything else, feel free to check out our free resources and courses in the description. Of this video and make sure you hit that subscribe button, hit that notification bell so that you don't miss any more content on this topic. We love that you are the best part of this community, the best part of this channel. We really thank you for watching us all the time and give this video a like as well, give this video a thumbs up. It helps us a ton with our goal of reaching a million entrepreneur expats, and aspiring expats. I'm Justin Keltner. Thanks so much again for your time, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Bye for now.