- Cost Comparison
Visa fees built tech outsourcing. Your zip code bills you.
A fee on moving people priced the desk. Firms still buy desks.
Visa fees, tech outsourcing, a local paralegal: all three price a chair rather than a person. A fee to move a worker into the United States does not stop the work. It moves it. Tech companies worked that out years ago, and every increase since has sharpened the same arithmetic. A firm that sponsors nobody pays the same premium on every local hire. The fee is not the story. The comparison underneath it is.
What visa fees actually price in tech outsourcing
A visa fee is not a wage. It is not a skill premium and it is not a tax on talent. It is the price of insisting that one named person sit inside the United States while working. Raise it and engineers do not get more expensive. Proximity gets more expensive. I read every increase the same way, as a number attached to a chair. The engineer was never the line item under review. The desk was.
The case for moving a person across an ocean has to meet a burden of proof. Every fee increase raises it. Most roles cannot meet it now. Someone pushing code to a repository does not need a chair in San Jose to push it. Somebody decided years ago that they did. Nobody priced that decision. Then a fee arrived and priced it for them, in public, on a schedule anyone could read. That is not a labor cost. That is rent on a zip code.
The fee did not create that cost. It itemized it.
What that has to do with a firm that sponsors nobody
A 40-person personal injury firm sponsors no one. Its paralegals live inside driving distance. The intake staff sit down the hall. Marketing is bought from an agency across town. No line in that budget touches an immigration fee schedule. Not one. So the fee is not the connection. The habit underneath it is.
What tech learned was not how to dodge a cost. It learned to split one question into two. What the work requires, and where the person doing it has to sit. Those two had been answered together for decades, by habit. Firms price a marketing seat by what that title costs three blocks away, and call that the market rate. It is a rate for the work plus a rate for the commute, charged as one number. Nothing on the invoice separates them. The premium is there whether or not a fee makes it visible.
I think the second half is the harder one, because it is a question about the firm rather than the candidate. A person down the hall can be asked something at four and answer at four. Supervision is easier in a room. Firms buying local are buying that, and it is worth buying. Most of them never use it. Whether a remote hire produces anything depends on repositories, schedules, and who reviews the output. That is answerable before anyone is interviewed. Most firms have never asked it. They have only ever bought the desk and the person together.
Tech never saved a cent on visa fees. It stopped buying the building. Different purchase.
People also ask about this
Why do visa fees push companies toward outsourcing?
Do visa fee increases affect law firms that do not sponsor anyone?
Related Topics
Recommended Readings
Build Your Offshore Team Risk-Free
No upfront cost. Fill roles in 14 days. Pre-vetted, not just pre-screened.