Donald Trump‘s latest genius idea for “Making America Great Again” is to chase out the very brains that keep the country running. Remember Michio Kaku’s warning? It just came true.
On Friday, the Labor Department quietly announced that the cost for employers to hire an H-1B worker would skyrocket from $1,000 to an impossible $100,000. At this point, every fresh stroke of Trump’s pen looks less like policy and more like vandalism, dragging the U.S. not into the future but straight back into the Dark Ages. But the MAGA strongman is forgetting that his newest target is actually the backbone of Silicon Valley and America’s tech dominance.
The well-known American theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, once called the H-1B visa “America’s secret weapon.” Now, as Donald Trump tries to gut that very weapon, his justification is the same tired MAGA talking point: that it will free up jobs for Americans. The problem? Kaku dismantled that fantasy years ago. “There are no Americans who can take these jobs,” he said flatly. In a resurfaced video from almost 15 years ago, Kaku goes point by point, explaining why “the scientific establishment of this country would collapse” without the H-1B.
“Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley without the H-1B. You know what the H-1B is? It’s the genius visa. You realise that in the United States, 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign-born?… the United States is a magnet sucking up all of the brains of the world.”
Trump hasn’t outright killed the program, but by slapping a staggering $100,000 price tag on every H-1B visa, up from just $1,000, he’s basically plastered a “closed for business” sign across the U.S. economy. Tech giants might manage to absorb the hit, but the real death blow will land on small businesses and startups. These companies depend on specialized talent to compete and innovate, and for them, this hike is a death sentence.
Kaku’s warning reads like a prophecy: “You remove the H-1B visa, and you collapse the economy.” He even pointed to a Wall Street Journal editorial that shredded the same line of reasoning Trump is now pushing. Back then, congressmen were pushing to ban the H-1Bs, claiming they “took jobs away” from Americans. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s blunt reply that Trump needs to read now:
“The Wall Street Journal editorialised against a congressman who wanted to ban the H-1B, saying they’ll take jobs away from the American people. The Wall Street Journal said: Look, there are no Americans who can take these jobs. These are at the highest level of high technology. They don’t take away jobs from Americans; they create entire industries.”
The irony is that Trump has packaged this as a patriotic defense of American jobs, when in reality it is very much a death sentence for small businesses and startups, and an undercover act of discrimination against the very foreign workers who built the foundations of America’s rise.
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