America's $100K H1B Visa Fee Just Created Europe's Biggest Tech Opportunity. If We Don’t Fumble.

This op-ed was originally published in German in Tagesspiegel Background.

The chaos at San Francisco International Airport on September 20, 2025, said it all: a horde of tech workers holding an H1B visa scramble to board flights; others disembark, fearing to be locked out of Trump’s America.

H1B visas were the lifeline of the American tech industry. President Trump just turned them into luxury goods: he raised the fee for new H1B petitions from $1,500 to $100,000 overnight, a nearly 67-fold increase in cost. This immigration policy shift marks the greatest talent transfer opportunity Europe has seen in decades.

The scale of the shift speaks for itself: Amazon employs over 10,000 H1B workers and faces potential costs of $1 billion for new petitions. Y Combinator's CEO called it "kneecap[ing] startups" and a "massive gift to overseas tech hubs". Jorge Lopez, the chair of the immigration and global mobility practice group at Littler Mendelson PC, told BBC that this "will put the brakes on American competitiveness in the tech sector and all industries".

This could be a generational gift for Europe. Interface's research shows that America has priced out the workers Europe needs the most: over 60% of H1B holders are highly qualified tech workers. They are precisely who Europe needs to fill its 1.2 million gap. The question now is whether Europe can seize the moment.

New calculations for startups & talent

Historically, Europe forms the ideas and talent, but then it exports it to Silicon Valley because it doesn't provide inventors with competitive salaries and opportunities to scale.

Mistral AI's €1.1 billion raise shows European AI startups can attract capital. But what they couldn't attract was the 25-year-old machine learning engineer from Bangalore who had three offers from US companies that pay orders of magnitude more.

Today, that engineer faces a different calculation. US startups can't afford the H1B visa. European startups can offer a Blue Card for highly skilled non-EU workers, equity, and a life where rent doesn't consume 60% of salary.

What’s more, H1B visa exiles want to come to Europe. Barney Hussey-Yeo, CEO of British AI startup Cleo, reported receiving over 1,000 direct messages from highly skilled professionals considering leaving the U.S. since the H1B changes, describing them as "Computer Science graduates from the world's top universities now working at elite tech companies."

But speed matters. While Brussels agonizes over debates, its competitors are mobilizing.

Canada is looking into new policies for tech workers, the UK is considering abolishing visa fees for top talent, China launched its K Visa for STEM workers - no job offer required, South Korea hopes to recruit displaced talent, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia are leveraging their Golden Visa programs and mega-projects like NEOM to position themselves as the next tech hubs.

Emergency response, not reform, is the solution

The European Blue Card isn’t fit for purpose. Its applications only grew from 20,979 in 2016 to 89,037 in 2023. Processing takes 90 days while the UK's Global Talent visa takes three weeks. Salary thresholds exclude startup roles where equity matters more than base pay. There are 27 national implementations of what should be one European solution. Most absurdly, the EU still does not recognize remote work across its internal borders, when tech companies are distributed by default.

We mobilized €750 billion for NextGenerationEU in months, created vaccine passports in weeks. Talent deserves the same urgency. 

Europe has the chance to reinvent its growth by creating a fast-track EU “Innovation Visa” – 48-hour processing, equity compensation as part of salary requirements, automatic spousal working rights. Crucially, these “Innovation Visas” must be valid for at least five years, a minimum time to make an impact on emerging industries. Finally, tech workers must be allowed full mobility across the EU: we need a single regime for startups and startuppers.

Europe’s window isn’t years – it’s weeks. The planes are boarding. Either we’re on them, along with the people who can help Europe engineer its future, or we’re watching from the terminal as they fly to Toronto, Beijing, and anywhere but here.

Siddhi Pal is an expert in AI labor market issues for interface, a European tech think tank. Leonardo Quattrucci is an Adjunct Professor of innovation at Sciences Po, Paris, and an advisor to startups and public institutions.