Silicon Valley has a lot to worry about these days. Antitrust persecutions, tariffs that’ll heavily impact their ability to trade, assuring compliance with endless regulations and government controls.

Now, they’re adding an increasing concern over the immigration status of their workers to the list. The Washington Post reports that tech companies are telling their immigrant employees not to travel abroad, as there’s a non-trivial chance that they won’t be allowed to get back in and get their visas revoked at the border

The risk of having visas revoked has increased under Trump — and companies having to tell foreign workers that they may not be allowed back into the country for no good reason should make one question how free American businesses really are.

But the problems with worker visa system as such far predates Trump. Businesses fear for their foreign employees in part because procuring visas in the first place is a Kafkaesque process that heavily impinges on their capacity to bring in the talent they want to hire, and throws a wrench to already difficult and bureaucratic hiring processes.

The U.S. immigration system is extremely convoluted, onerous and makes it nearly impossible for most people to immigrate to America legally. It actively blocks companies from hiring the foreign workers they want. The most popular visa to bring in skilled workers, the H-1B visa, is an example of this bureaucratic nightmare.

The H-1B is a visa exclusively for hiring workers on “specialty occupations” that require at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. Some occupations encompassed in this visa are engineering, medical sciences, and technology. The government unilaterally decides and defines what classifies as a “specialty occupation,” and whether the degree an individual holds matches the job they intend to perform in the U.S.

There’s an awfully limited number of visas given each year: only 65,000 and an extra 20,000 for workers with a U.S. degree. While this may seem like a lot, it’s not — each year, the demand for the visas far exceeds their availability. In FY2024, there were 758,994 applications, and in FY2025 there were 470,342. That means that only a tiny fraction of the over 50,000 unique employers that requested those visas got to hire the foreign talented they wanted those years. Furthermore, the program utilizes a lottery system that makes workforce planning unreliable (applicants are put in a lottery and randomly selected to receive a visa).

But that’s not where the difficulty ends. To hire foreign workers, employers must comply with extensive regulations that require, among other things, that they prove that no native-born American can do that job and that hiring an H-1B worker won’t somehow negatively impact working conditions for U.S. workers. Between government fees and attorney fees, hiring a single worker can cost upwards of $8000 and countless lawyer and personnel hours—an enormously onerous enterprise, especially for small businesses.

Because H-1B visas are temporary, if a company wants to retain a worker for more than six years they must apply for their green card—another expensive, bureaucratic and unpredictable process. (Due to country caps, for some nationalities there is a decades-long wait for employment-based green cards, in one case exceeding 100 years.)

Knowing how complicated and expensive it is to hire a foreign worker, one can understand why companies are so concerned over losing them. The loss of a single key employee can be disastrous for a company—and for the worker who’s trying to build a life in America.

The uncertainty this system brings to hiring decisions makes it difficult for businesses to plan long-term and impacts their productivity and the quality of their products and services.

Imagine a hospital that’s understaffed like many others in America and wishes to hire nurses and doctors from abroad, but is unable to do so due to immigration restrictions. This may lead to current workers being overworked and seeing fewer patients. Consider the thousands of pregnant women in parts of Mississippi and Idaho who can’t find an obstetrician, or the large numbers of Americans who live in a “cardiology desert” and can’t access life-saving care. What stands in the way of them getting care? The doctors that could treat them didn’t win the H-1B lottery, or rural hospitals simply can’t afford the process.

What, in effect, these policies imply is that it’s better to have Americans in need of care die or go untreated rather than let an immigrant doctor get to work. Imagine this scenario playing out across the whole country and multiple industries — tech, research, education — to begin to get an idea of the pervasiveness of these restrictions.

Businesses should have the ability to hire and easily retain foreign talent to maximize their productivity, profits, and provide the best possible service to their customers. Their right to make judgments and decisions about their own workforce should be respected, and they should be able to operate within a system that permits them to plan long-term and with enough certainty about the future. They shouldn’t have to carry the boulder of Kafkaesque regulations up the hill to bring in a worker, and they shouldn’t be made to fear that a simple trip abroad might spell disaster for their company if a visa is revoked.

There can be reforms made to the current H-1B system to inch closer to freedom for businesses to hire, such as getting rid of the annual caps. But ultimately, a much freer immigration system should be built in its place that respects and empowers producers to plan and execute their work to the best of their ability with the workers that they want to hire, local or foreign, allowing peaceful people to live and work where they desire and enabling Americans to trade with them.

Agustina Vergara Cid is a Young Voices Contributor. You can follow her on X at @agustinavcid