Trump Slaps €93,000 Fee on US Work Visas: Maltese Tech Talent Locked Out

**Trump’s $100k Visa Price Tag: Maltese Tech Talent Forced to Rethink the American Dream**

Valletta – For two decades the ritual has been the same: finish top of your class at MCAST or the University of Malta, land a summer internship at a Santa Monica gaming studio or a Manhattan fintech, file the paperwork for an H-1B “skilled-worker” visa, and you’re on the escalator to a six-figure US salary. That escalator just got a six-digit toll-booth.

Last night Donald Trump announced that every H-1B petition will now carry a “border-security levy” of USD 100,000 (€93,000), payable by the employer before the lottery is even entered. The measure, slipped into a late-night executive order titled “Putting American Workers First,” is couched as a way to fund the still-unbuilt wall with Mexico. In practice it prices an entire tier of non-US talent out of the market—and sends shock waves through Malta’s tight-knit tech diaspora.

“Basically they just shut the door,” said Maria Cassar, 28, a St Julian’s UX designer whose petition for a Los Angeles augmented-reality start-up was filed last Friday. “My prospective boss messaged me at 3 a.m.: ‘We love you, but we can’t drop an extra hundred grand before you walk in the door.’” Cassar is one of 317 Maltese citizens who were in this year’s H-1B pipeline, according to Identity Malta data shared with *Hot Malta*. Another 1,200 are on optional practical training (OPT) extensions after American degrees and were hoping to convert next year. The fee applies retroactively to any petition selected in the 2025 lottery, meaning even winners now have 30 days to stump up the cash or forfeit the slot.

Local industry insiders say the fee could cripple Malta’s fastest-growing export: human brains. “We’ve spent ten years branding Malta as a blockchain and AI launch-pad,” said Antoine Zammit, CEO of recruitment firm Konnekt. “The narrative was: cut your teeth here, then conquer Silicon Valley. That pipeline just froze.” Zammit estimates that 40 % of Konnekt’s placements in the past year involved US-bound Maltese engineers. “Clients are already asking us about Toronto and Dubai instead.”

Cultural fallout is already visible on Facebook group “Maltese in USA,” normally a forum for apartment hunts and ħobż biż-żejt cravings. Posts pivoted overnight from “Best place to watch the derby in Brooklyn” to “Anyone looked at Germany?” One member uploaded a meme of the Maltese passport photoshopped with a golden padlock and the caption: “Born in the EU, priced out of the US.” Within six hours it had 1,800 reactions and 300 commiserating comments.

The timing stings because Malta’s own labour market is overheating. Unemployment stands at 2.8 %, and employers here complain they can’t fill AI and cyber-security roles fast enough. Paradoxically, the US fee could end up being a windfall for the local economy—if talent returns. “We’re already fielding calls from US-educated Maltese who want to come back rather than pay second-tier wages in Dublin or Lisbon,” said Mario Buttigieg, COO of iGaming giant Betsson, which plans to add 150 tech jobs in Q3. Government officials are equally opportunistic. Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship Alex Muscat told *Hot Malta* that a new “Return & Thrive” tax credit—up to €20,000 over three years for repatriating graduates—will be fast-tracked within weeks. “We can’t match California salaries, but we can offer Mediterranean quality of life and EU mobility,” Muscat said.

Still, for many the American dream dies hard. Luke Vella, a 25-year-old AI researcher from Żurrieq, has spent the last three winters interning at Boston-based robotics labs. “My entire PhD funding pathway assumed an American post-doc,” he said, scrolling through the rejection email on his phone outside the University of Malta library. “Now I’m looking at Toronto, but the truth is the best datasets, the best conferences, the best peers are still in the States. A hundred grand is a house deposit in Malta. It’s a psychological barrier as much as a financial one.”

Whether that barrier proves temporary depends on November’s US election and the courts—immigration lawyers have already filed challenges arguing the levy oversteps executive authority. Until then, Malta’s brightest will keep refreshing their inboxes, calculators open, weighing the price of a dream that suddenly costs as much as a Sliema penthouse.