Virginia by the Numbers
Virginia employers secured nearly 110,000 H-1B visa approvals for foreign skilled workers between 2021 and 2025, underscoring the state’s deep reliance on global talent.
Virginia ranks fifth nationwide in total H-1B approvals and stands to be among the hardest hit by President Donald Trump’s proclamation raising the application fee to $100,000. Virginia trails only California, Texas, New York and New Jersey in H-1B visa approvals, with nearly 22,000 granted to Virginia-based employers in fiscal year 2025.
The non-immigrant H-1B program allows employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialized occupations such as architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, business specialities, accounting, law, theology and the arts. The visa is valid for three years and can be renewed for an additional three years. About 583,000 workers had H-1B visas in 2019, the most recent year the Department of Homeland Security published data on the work visas.
Before the executive action, companies typically paid between $2,000 and $5,000 per visa petition, according to the American Immigration Council.
Trump’s proclamation states that the H-1B visa program – which was created to bring temporary, high-skilled workers into the U.S. – has been exploited to replace American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.
The new fee is aimed at making it more expensive to import skilled foreign workers and incentivizing companies to hire more U.S. workers. It took effect on September 21.
Virginia’s visa total includes both new applications and renewals. It does not necessarily reflect the number of foreign workers who work in the state. Employers may sponsor workers in Virginia and assign them to offices elsewhere.
It is unclear whether companies would pay the new application fee even for existing foreign workers if they change jobs.
Trump’s proclamation is a culmination of calls to curtail the influx of foreign workers. Demand for employees with specialized expertise regularly outpaces the annual 85,000 visa cap mandated by Congress.
Certain employers, such as non-profit higher education institutions, hospitals and government research organizations, are not subject to the cap.
In Virginia, where the demand for specialized foreign workers is high, the new policy complicates the H-1B process for employers across multiple sectors.
Among the sectors likely to be most impacted in the Commonwealth is higher education. Virginia’s colleges and universities often hire foreign professionals for scientific research and development. In the 2025 fiscal year, 484 H-1B visas were approved for higher ed institutions.
Of all the higher ed institutions in the state, the University of Virginia employs the most foreign experts on H-1B visas. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 180 visas for the institution in the 2025 fiscal year, making up more than a third of all approvals to Virginia’s colleges and universities for the year. Seventeen of those visas were for applications submitted by the UVA Physicians Group, the organization that handles recruitment for the UVA School of Medicine. A few of the visas also went to the UVA Darden School of Business and the UVA Investment Management Company.
After the presidential announcement, UVA told its employees who are on H-1B visas to travel with caution.
“The university is in the process of understanding this proclamation, its implementation, and its impact on our workforce,” the university’s Deputy Spokesperson, Bethanie Glover, told the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
More than 80 H-1B visas went to researchers and foreign faculty at Virginia Tech in 2025.
H-1B visas didn’t just flow to Virginia’s colleges and universities. Public school districts are increasingly relying on foreign workers to fill persistent teacher shortages. Districts with the highest number of H-1B approvals often fall within school regions facing the most severe teacher vacancy rates.
Take Portsmouth Public Schools, for example: in fiscal year 2025, USCIS approved 13 H-1B visas for the district. Portsmouth sits in Region 2, which covers Hampton Roads and the Eastern Shore. During the 2024–2025 school year, Region 2 reported a 6.53% vacancy rate across all position types, the highest among Virginia’s eight school regions.
Portsmouth Public Schools spokesperson Dr. Lauren Nolasco told VCIJ that the 13 positions were K-12 teachers. Since those visas are already approved, the district does not expect to pay the new application fee. If any of those teachers decides to move to another school, an application filed on their behalf may be treated as new, necessitating the payment of the new fee.
If the policy stands, it may complicate Portsmouth’s ability to hire foreign educators to fill vacant positions, according to Nolasco. The school division currently has 52 unfilled teaching positions out of a total of 923, according to Nolasco.
Although Virginia’s education sector gains considerably from the H-1B visa lottery, the program is dominated by the information technology and retail industries. Most foreign tech workers are employed in these sectors, with a significant share working for Amazon, the country’s largest retailer and web-service provider. Both industries rely heavily on the H-1B program to recruit technology specialists, drawing primarily from India and China.
About 97% of nearly 4,000 H-1B visas approved for IT workers in the 2025 fiscal year went to Amazon, whose HQ2 in Crystal City, Virginia, handles the H-1B process for the entire country. It is unclear how many of those workers are based in Virginia.
Following Trump’s proclamation, Amazon and other big tech companies sent urgent emails to foreign employees telling them to avoid international travel or return to the U.S. immediately, according to Reuters. The advisory prompted many workers to cancel trips in panic. A follow-up later clarified that no action was necessary for those already holding H-1B visas.
Apart from the information industry, Amazon, which employs an estimated 1.5 million employees nationwide, also takes the majority of the H-1B visas going to the retail sector. Of about 10,500 visas to the industry last year, at least 98% went to the retail giant.
While companies brace for the impact of the cost of the H-1B visas, one expert said the fee hike would hit smaller companies hard.
“Most of my clients are doctors working in shortage areas of Virginia and other rural areas like federally-qualified health clinics or smaller employers,” said immigration lawyer Jennifer Minear. “There are nonprofit health care organizations trying to hire doctors to work in shortage areas. They can't pay $100,000 extra to sponsor doctors. They're already paying thousands of dollars in legal fees and filing fees, and now $100,000 on top of that.”
Minear, a director at the Richmond-based law firm, McCandlish Holton, and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association, said the panic and anxiety from clients and even lawyers following the proclamation is like nothing she had seen in the past two decades.
According to her, the proclamation is fraught with contradictions that make it hard for lawyers to guide their clients. For example, lawyers are uncertain whether the proposal applies to employees renewing their visas or switching jobs.
“We don't know what to say to people,” she said, “because there aren't any answers yet.”
Reach Kunle Falayi at Kunle.Falayi@vcij.org or @whro.org.
