Goodbye RTO? The $100,000 Visa Pushes Companies To Go Digital-First

Initially published on Forbes September 25, 2025

Work no longer needs a passport. For decades, the American pathway for global talent was straightforward: bring people to the U.S., let them build careers in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, and innovation would follow. The ability to work from anywhere was already eroding that model step by step. Now, with a $100,000 fee attached to every H-1B visa, the conversation about where work happens gains an economic dimension. What looks like an immigration story may become a tipping point in the social contract of work. Instead of talent moving to work, work will move to talent.

From Importing People To Exporting Work

A policy designed to make it harder to move people may end up making it easier to move work. Until now, the conversation about where people work was driven largely by employee preferences. The new cost structure adds a financial calculus. Relocating workers will increasingly be reserved for the rarest, most business-critical skills. For everyone else, companies will move the work to them.

While some CEOs are still pushing for return-to-office mandates, policy moves like this one push in the opposite direction — toward global dispersion. That means more investment in global delivery centers, regional hubs, and remote-first teams. In effect, the cost of an H-1B visa has become the best marketing campaign for the “work from anywhere” era.

India-oriented sources are already pitching the $100,000 H-1B cost as a boon for India’s Global Capability Centers (GCCs). Their argument is that U.S. firms will offload more work domestically in India rather than sponsor costly visa moves. And they are right.

This is yet another reason for organizations to treat their workforce as a global community, not as concentric circles of headquarters and outposts. If fewer specialists come to Silicon Valley or Wall Street, companies may place greater emphasis on ecosystems abroad — whether that’s AI research clusters in Toronto, biotech labs in Singapore, or fintech hubs in Nairobi. This process will disperse innovation, currently consolidated in a few U.S. cities, creating a more polycentric global economy. The long-term effect is a redistribution of economic power toward regions that can retain and grow their own talent.

But it’s not just where companies place work that changes. It’s also how they think about the careers and cultures that hold their organizations together.

Careers Without Borders

The $100,000 threshold is more than a hiring challenge; it may reshape the arc of careers. Only the most specialized or executive-level roles will justify the cost of sponsorship. For most skilled professionals, entry into the U.S. market will no longer be a realistic pathway.

That means domestic employers will have to work harder to cultivate local skills while also collaborating with distributed teams abroad.  Companies can no longer rely on steady inflows of technical talent. Reskilling programs, apprenticeships, and stronger links to universities will become a competitive necessity.

For workers everywhere, the broader lesson is clear: careers will be built in local ecosystems that are globally connected. Skills must be portable across industries and platforms, not just borders. The new career advantage isn’t the ability to move physically but the ability to plug into digital networks of work.

Culture Without Walls

If employees no longer need to relocate to be part of an organization, the challenge becomes less about visas and more about belonging. Headquarters perks and office prestige lose their power in favor of shared narratives, transparent leadership, and global communities of practice.

Like Manchester United fans feel connected to their team without ever setting foot in Manchester, company culture has to transcend headquarters walls and travel everywhere work happens.

This shift will also accelerate the growth of tools and services that make distributed work seamless. Compliance-as-a-service platforms, AI-powered collaboration tools, and global payroll solutions are no longer peripheral; they’re essential. Companies that once thought of these as nice-to-have HR tech investments will see them as the backbone of their workforce strategy.

From Problem To Opportunity

There are two ways to read this moment. One is as a problem for the U.S. economy: while the U.S. raises barriers with a $100,000 H-1B visa fee, others are lowering them with fast-track talent visas and digital nomad programs. The other is as an opportunity — a forcing function for U.S. companies to adapt faster to a digital-first, global talent mindset. That mindset is more suited to the future of work than a model built on clustering people in a few U.S. cities.

Work is going digital. Work is going global. And organizations that embrace this reality will not just adapt to the policy shift — they will lead the future by building strategies, cultures, and careers that move as freely as talent itself.