$3,800 Flights and Aborted Takeoffs: How Trump’s H-1B Announcement Panicked Tech Workers

After a six-week work trip Xiayun, an employee at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed at her hometown in China for vacation when she saw the news about H-1B visas. On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.” The news left Xiayun and hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers scrambling…