What The Proposed H-1B Visa Means for HR Teams - How to Avoid H-1B Visa Fees and Navigate the Legal Landscape of Borderless Hiring

The proposed $100,000 fee for H-1B visa petitions is more than a financial hurdle—it’s a dramatic shift in legal and workforce risk management. For decades, the H-1B program has been a necessary, if complicated, pathway to secure specialized global talent. Now, what was already a complicated and costly system is poised to become cost-prohibitive - if not downright fiscally irresponsible - for many organizations.

The impact goes beyond the price tag. The traditional H-1B framework and lottery system is unpredictable — with approval odds hovering around 35 percent. Companies have no guarantee of securing talent needed to launch critical projects or fuel innovation. The costs and delays create immense strain on existing teams and stall company growth and expansion.

As legal and HR leaders, we can’t afford to be constrained by outdated visa frameworks that are becoming increasingly prohibitive. While we can’t control immigration policy, we can control how we mitigate business risks and how we as business leaders respond to it. This moment demands a strategic, legally sound pivot to global hiring. By shifting to hiring talent worldwide with compliant models like setting up a legal entity in the relevant country or partnering with a global employment leader like G-P, HR teams can onboard talent in days, with efficiency, costs and predictability that the H-1B lottery simply cannot offer.

The Business Imperative for Global Employment

Traditional visa frameworks were not designed for the realities of today’s global workforce. In a world where businesses operate across time zones and digital collaboration is the norm, the constraints of immigration systems are increasingly misaligned with modern work.  Meanwhile, critical skill shortages continue to widen, especially in fields like engineering, AI, cybersecurity and healthcare.

That’s why more businesses are adopting borderless hiring strategies, not just as a workaround to visa complexity, but as a sustainable, long-term model. By expanding talent acquisition beyond boundaries, organizations gain more than just access to candidates. They gain resilience, agility and choice.

A borderless approach reduces reliance on restrictive and unpredictable visa pathways, enabling companies to hire talent with specialized skills wherever they are located. It also fosters more diverse, globally fluent teams that can better drive innovation and cultural intelligence. Most importantly, it allows businesses to scale operations and support growth in new markets without the delays of relocation or immigration processes.

Our 2025 World at Work Report shows that 84% of executives struggle to find skilled talent locally. That reality underscores a critical truth: global hiring is no longer only a competitive advantage, it is a business imperative

The Legal Realities of Borderless Hiring

Shifting to a global model is a strategic imperative, but it is not a bypass of legal responsibility. In fact, it requires an expanded, meticulous approach to compliance. The importance of understanding the legal considerations and the risks companies face when they fail to comply with local laws cannot be overstated.

Hiring across borders means adhering to multiple national and local laws. Every country has its own rules on employment, including notice and severance requirements, social contributions and benefits. A compliant employment agreement in Germany will look vastly different from one in Singapore or Brazil.

Keeping pace with these variations can feel overwhelming, especially when regulations evolve faster than businesses can adapt. That’s why having the right legal infrastructure and global expertise in place is essential to move with confidence instead of hesitation. Luckily, new innovations in purpose-built AI made just for global employment can help teams navigate these complexities in a fraction of the time compared to doing it manually.

The latest HR AI agents can make the borderless hiring process simpler by ensuring that companies can hire in compliance with labor laws, while minimizing exposure to legal risk. That means you can get more help than ever to manage local compliance, from payroll and taxes to benefits administration and employment documentation. This enables companies to build teams where the talent resides, without having to navigate unfamiliar labor codes independently and without paying expensive visa fees.

The benefit is peace of mind. When compliance is handled proactively, leaders can spend less time interpreting unfamiliar laws and more time doing what they do best: developing people, strengthening company culture and driving organizational strategy.  A strong compliance foundation allows teams to innovate freely and respond quickly when opportunities emerge

Avoiding H-1B Dependency Through Workforce Design

Instead of waiting on visa outcomes, companies can rethink workforce architecture now, focusing on three core principles:

1. Hire where the talent already is. Not every critical role needs to be relocated. Remote-first collaboration has made it possible to hire exceptional people in their home country and still embed them fully into company culture.

2. Align global hiring with business priorities. Skills, time zones, product roadmaps and customer needs should guide location choices, not outdated assumptions about where teams “should” sit.

3. Build the infrastructure for equitable global employment. Standardize certain policies and benefits (while taking into consideration local requirements) to ensure a globally distributed team experiences consistency and equity, fostering a cohesive single company culture regardless of location.

As global workforces expand, it becomes less about transactional processes and more about enabling strategy through people. Borderless teams thrive when employees feel equally supported, informed and included no matter their geography.

A Turning Point for the Modern Workforce

The proposed H-1B fee is a wake-up call. Not just about immigration policy, but about the future of work. With talent being a critical asset, we can’t allow our strategies to be defined by borders, lotteries or multi-year waiting periods.

Business leaders have the opportunity to shape a more flexible and global workforce model. Borderless hiring undeniably offers a strategic advantage by allowing businesses to bypass restrictive, outdated systems and build a comprehensive talent strategy that reflects the realities of modern work.

This shift is not a temporary measure, but an investment in a sustainable, people-first approach to global employment. It is the path that helps companies remain agile, competitive and legally compliant, while empowering individuals to do their best work from anywhere in the world. The organizations that embrace this transformation today will secure a decisive advantage—they will not only hire faster, but also lead the way in building the next generation of truly global and resilient workplaces.

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Nicole Forbes, G-P is the Deputy General Counsel at Globalization Partners (G-P), where she leads the global Employment Counsel and Compliance team, overseeing worldwide employment-related legal matters, compliance, and litigation. Nicole is also co-founder and Chair of the Government Affairs Committee of the Global Employment Innovation Organization, a global employment industry consortium dedicated to elevating the industry through the development of standards, education, and advocacy. Prior to joining G-P, Nicole practiced employment law and litigation at several law firms in Boston.