The Trump administration has made it a lot more expensive to hire skilled workers from other countries, and the company most affected in Oregon could be sportswear giant Nike.

Each year, the U.S. approves 85,000 visas for specially skilled workers, called H-1B visas. On Sunday, the fee for those visas jumped from a few thousand dollars to $100,000, according to a proclamation from the Trump Administration. The fee, which applies to new applicants but not current visa holders, will likely be challenged in court.

For at least the last decade, Nike has been the top beneficiary of H-1B visa applicants in Oregon, according to government data.

So far this year, employers in Oregon have secured around 885 new H1-B visas. More than a quarter of those visa holders, or about 225, work for Nike, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services H-1B employer database. In 2024, companies in Oregon were awarded nearly 1,400 H-1B visa spots; of those, nearly 250 went to Nike.

A Nike spokesperson told OPB the company was closely tracking the news regarding the application fee, but declined to comment further.

In the proclamation instituting the high application fee, President Donald Trump wrote that the program has been misused.

“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions,” Trump said in the proclamation, “but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

However, economic research from the last decade mostly shows economic benefits of the visa program. Studies on H-1B visa workers have found that a high number of skilled foreign workers in a region can boost entrepreneurship and help spur economic growth.

The majority of H-1B visas go to specially trained technology workers able to perform complex tasks in technical fields such as artificial intelligence or medicine. Major technology firms like Amazon, Google and Microsoft employ tens of thousands of H-1B visa workers. For example, in Washington state, Microsoft has already received more than 5,000 H-1B visas this year.

Trump specifically called out technology firms, pointing to the number of H-1B visa applications versus recent layoffs. The proclamation points to one “IT firm” approved for 1,700 visas that had “announced it was laying off 2,400 American workers in Oregon in July.”

The comment is likely in reference to computer chip company Intel, which is Oregon’s largest private employer. However, Intel’s applications for H-1B visa workers were for its operations in Arizona, not Oregon, according to the government database.

Last month, the Trump administration said it was investing $8.9 billion in Intel, representing a nearly 10% stake in the business.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/22/oregon-h-1b-fee-worker-visa-nike-impact/