By AFP
September 24, 2025
Image: — © Digital Journal.
Corin FAIFE
On a bright September morning, employees stream through the turnstiles and vast lobby of Goldman Sachs’ headquarters in the sunlit Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan.
More than 9,000 people work at the investment bank’s New York head office.
And hundreds of them depend on the H-1B skilled worker visa, recently targeted by the Trump administration for a dramatic overhaul.
A September 19 order by President Donald Trump mandates $100,000 payments from companies for every new hire through the program.
Though the major impact will be on the tech sector — the largest source of H-1B hiring — financial companies like Goldman Sachs will also be forced to re-evaluate their practice of hiring from abroad.
– Concentration in New York
In the first two quarters of 2025, Goldman Sachs was the biggest recipient of H-1B visas in New York City. The Big Apple was, in turn, the single location with the most H-1B recipients in all of the United States.
Aggregated at the state level, California and Texas both attract more H-1B visa holders than the state of New York; but there is no one city or town in either of these states that boasts a higher number of H-1B holders than the east coast metropolis.
This concentration of H-1B visas in New York is driven by hiring at Wall Street’s financial giants.
Data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services analyzed by AFP shows that four of the top five H-1B visa recipients in New York City are financial services companies: the investment banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup, and financial data company Bloomberg.
The other company in the top five is the consulting and professional services firm McKinsey.
Goldman Sachs is among financial service firms based in Lower Manhattan that employ large numbers of skilled foreign workers whose H-1B visa status could be jeopardized through recent actions by the US government – Copyright AFP/File Johannes EISELE
Further down the list, and outside of the finance sector, universities such as Columbia and NYU and medical institutions like the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weil Cornell Medical College also brought a number of H-1B hires to the city.
– Negative impacts
According to 2025 data, H-1B positions filled by the banks skewed towards the more technical side of the finance industry, with many visa holders working in software engineering, quantitative analytics, and data science.
Goldman Sachs did not respond to emailed questions asking how a $100,000 price tag would impact their ability to hire for such roles in the future.
Contacted by AFP with similar questions, Bloomberg and Citigroup declined to comment.
In general, experts believe the fee will lead to a large reduction in applications for the visa scheme, which could have further negative impacts on the economy.
“A visa fee of this scale is likely to drastically curtail the use of H-1B visas,” Ethan G. Lewis, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, told AFP.
“It will lead to reduced hires of US workers and slower productivity growth, and, longer term, discourage people [from other countries] from going to college and beyond in the US, because many tend to rely on H-1B visas for their first job out of studies.”
In the tech industry the announcement of the visa fee has caused consternation, with many entrepreneurs — among them Trump’s ally Elon Musk — warning that the US will not be able to fill highly skilled roles with only homegrown talent.
Others have speculated that, rather than being offered to American workers, some jobs will simply be outsourced overseas.
Tech migrants ‘key’ for US growth, warns OECD chief economist
By AFP
September 23, 2025
Alvaro Pereira said high-skilled migrants were a 'key strength' of the US economy - Copyright AFP STR
Ali BEKHTAOUI
High-skilled migrants are vital for the US economy, the OECD’s chief economist told AFP, after the United States imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas widely used by the tech industry.
Alvaro Pereira, who is leaving his post after being named governor of Portugal’s central bank, spoke to AFP as the Paris-based organisation released an updated outlook for the world economy.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a 38-member grouping of wealthy nations, upgraded the forecast to 3.2 percent growth in 2025, up from 2.9 percent in its last report in June.
The OECD said the economy “proved more resilient than anticipated” in the first half of the year as companies rushed to import goods before US President Donald Trump’s tariffs took effect.
It also raised the US growth outlook from 1.6 percent to 1.8 percent but warned it was expected to slow as higher tariffs start to bite.
The OECD said cuts in the US federal workforce and Trump’s crackdown on immigration would also soften growth.
“There’s obviously less labour growth and less labour growth means that obviously this will impact total GDP,” Pereira told AFP.
He noted that the report was written before the new H-1B visa fee rule came into force over the weekend.
“We do think that continuing to attract high-skilled individuals from the United States or from around the world is a key strength of the US economy,” Pereira said.
“This will only become exacerbated with the AI boom, because basically there’s significant labour shortages in the ICT (information and communication technology) sector.”
H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialised skills — such as scientists, engineers and computer programmers — to work in the US, initially for three years but extendable to six.
Such visas are widely used by the tech industry. Indian nationals account for nearly three-quarters of the permits allotted via lottery system each year.
The US and Germany are the two OECD countries with the highest labour shortage in the ICT sector, Pereira said.
– Tariff impact taking ‘longer’ –
The OECD report said the impact of Trump’s tariffs had been mitigated by companies “front-loading” — importing goods before the levies came into force.
“The impact of tariffs is taking longer to reach the economy,” Pereira said.
“A lot of firms decided to act and export a stockpile (to) the United States … to avoid the tariffs.”
But he warned that the OECD was already seeing “less growth and more inflation” than expected.
“Usually when the world economy is doing really well, it’s growing around four percent, so were far away from that,” he said.
By AFP
September 23, 2025
Alvaro Pereira said high-skilled migrants were a 'key strength' of the US economy - Copyright AFP STR
Ali BEKHTAOUI
High-skilled migrants are vital for the US economy, the OECD’s chief economist told AFP, after the United States imposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas widely used by the tech industry.
Alvaro Pereira, who is leaving his post after being named governor of Portugal’s central bank, spoke to AFP as the Paris-based organisation released an updated outlook for the world economy.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a 38-member grouping of wealthy nations, upgraded the forecast to 3.2 percent growth in 2025, up from 2.9 percent in its last report in June.
The OECD said the economy “proved more resilient than anticipated” in the first half of the year as companies rushed to import goods before US President Donald Trump’s tariffs took effect.
It also raised the US growth outlook from 1.6 percent to 1.8 percent but warned it was expected to slow as higher tariffs start to bite.
The OECD said cuts in the US federal workforce and Trump’s crackdown on immigration would also soften growth.
“There’s obviously less labour growth and less labour growth means that obviously this will impact total GDP,” Pereira told AFP.
He noted that the report was written before the new H-1B visa fee rule came into force over the weekend.
“We do think that continuing to attract high-skilled individuals from the United States or from around the world is a key strength of the US economy,” Pereira said.
“This will only become exacerbated with the AI boom, because basically there’s significant labour shortages in the ICT (information and communication technology) sector.”
H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialised skills — such as scientists, engineers and computer programmers — to work in the US, initially for three years but extendable to six.
Such visas are widely used by the tech industry. Indian nationals account for nearly three-quarters of the permits allotted via lottery system each year.
The US and Germany are the two OECD countries with the highest labour shortage in the ICT sector, Pereira said.
– Tariff impact taking ‘longer’ –
The OECD report said the impact of Trump’s tariffs had been mitigated by companies “front-loading” — importing goods before the levies came into force.
“The impact of tariffs is taking longer to reach the economy,” Pereira said.
“A lot of firms decided to act and export a stockpile (to) the United States … to avoid the tariffs.”
But he warned that the OECD was already seeing “less growth and more inflation” than expected.
“Usually when the world economy is doing really well, it’s growing around four percent, so were far away from that,” he said.
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