Nick Pyati, a Democrat running for Congress and a former Microsoft executive from India, has spoken out against President Donald Trump’s new executive order that charges $100,000 for H-1B visa applications. The president signed a decree on Friday that started the new measure, which Pyati dubbed a “tariff on talent.”
Pyati, who is running for a House seat in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, said that the new legislation will hurt the American economy. “Donald Trump is already hurting the economy with a tariff on goods, and now he’s hurting us even more with a tariff on talent,” he said. He said that the U.S. benefits from bringing in skilled people from other countries and that the decision is “simple: let them come and make our economy more competitive, or keep them out so they compete against us.”
Who is Nick Pyati?
Pyati is the son of Indian immigrants and grew up in the Chicago area. He has worked in both the public and private sectors in a variety of roles. He went to the University of Chicago and Columbia University before getting postgraduate degrees from Yale Law School and Harvard Kennedy School.
He started his career with Teach for America, where he taught English and second grade in New York City. During the Obama administration, he worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he specialized on charges of corporate price-fixing. Before running for Congress, Pyati was in charge of strategy for Microsoft’s Windows division, where he worked a lot on AI.
Trump’s changes to the H-1B visa
President Trump’s executive order says that H-1B visa applicants will have to pay a new charge of $100,000 every year. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says that “all big companies” approve the levy, which will be levied every year.
The H-1B visa program was set up so that corporations may hire highly skilled foreign workers for jobs that are hard to fill with U.S. citizens. However, critics, including the Trump administration, say that the program has been abused and is being used to bring in people from other countries who are ready to work for less money than many U.S. IT experts, who often make six figures. On Friday, Trump said that the IT industry would not be against the move, saying, “I think they’re going to be pleased.”