America Solves Immigration Problem

America Solves Immigration: $100,000 Entry Fee, Neighbourhood Spies, and a Bloke Called a “Homeland Defender”

By the London Prat Bureau of Transatlantic Policy Bewilderment

The Special Relationship Has Entered Its Bureaucratic Phase

The United States of America, that great nation which once declared self-evident truths about liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has landed on a new approach to skilled immigration: charge a hundred thousand dollars for a work visa, deploy agents to snoop round people’s gardens, and invent a paramilitary HR department called the Homeland Defenders. It is, by any measure, a bold strategy. Whether it is a strategy that makes sense is a question the Founding Fathers, who were themselves immigrants, would probably prefer not to answer from beyond the grave.

Here at The London Prat, we have been following America’s immigration convulsions with the fond, baffled concern of a parent watching a teenager dismantle a perfectly good bicycle to see if it goes faster. It does not go faster. Several parts are now missing. Someone is crying in the driveway.

Project Firewall: A Name That Suggests They’ve Confused Immigration With IT Support

In September 2025, the United States Department of Labour launched what it called Project Firewall — an enforcement initiative targeting abuse of the H-1B skilled worker visa programme. The project has generated a 48% surge in federal investigations, 200 ongoing probes by late 2025, and $15 million in assessed back wages. On those narrow terms, it is a reasonable and overdue piece of enforcement against genuine fraud.

Unfortunately, it was announced with the following post on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: “Highly-skilled jobs should go to AMERICANS FIRST!” — in capital letters, with an exclamation mark, which is how Americans write things when they want you to know they are very serious and have not slept.

As Jack Dee might observe: “Whenever someone shouts something in capital letters on the internet, I assume two things. First, that they are correct in a way that does not require understanding. Second, that there’s a spreadsheet somewhere that tells a completely different story.”

The spreadsheet, in this case, suggests that H-1B workers contribute disproportionately to American innovation, account for a substantial portion of patent applications, and are employed, in large numbers, in hospitals keeping rural America medically functional. But that information fits poorly on a banner, so it has been left off.

The $100,000 Filing Fee: Democracy’s Velvet Rope

In a proclamation signed in September 2025, President Trump restricted H-1B visa issuance to petitions accompanied by a payment of $100,000. One hundred thousand dollars. Per person. Per petition.

To contextualise this for a British readership: that is approximately the starting salary of a newly qualified NHS consultant, the cost of a modest two-bedroom flat in Stoke, or — and this is the relevant comparison — rather more than most skilled workers anywhere on Earth have in liquid savings before they have been given the job they are being asked to pay $100,000 to be considered for.

The policy has been widely noted as a significant deterrent to the kind of people it claims to want — highly skilled specialists who are, almost by definition, currently employed somewhere else and do not have six figures sitting in a current account earmarked for “American administrative optimism.” The Commerce Secretary described the logic thus: “Either the person is very valuable to the company and America, or they are going to depart and the company is going to hire an American.” This sentence was delivered with apparent confidence and should be read slowly, twice, before continuing.

Rural doctors have been identified as a particular casualty. Immigration attorneys have warned the fee “is going to wipe out a lot of health care for a lot of people across the country who really need it.” The White House responded that exemptions are “possible.” Physicians in rural Ohio presumably found this reassuring in the way that one finds a parachute reassuring when someone says they’ll “look into it.”

Korean Workers Detained at a Hyundai Plant — A Diplomatic Own Goal of Truly Impressive Proportions

Whilst Project Firewall was busy constructing its very expensive velvet rope around legal immigration, hundreds of South Korean workers were detained in a high-profile immigration raid at a Hyundai plant in Ellabell, Georgia. South Korea, it should be noted, is an American ally of several decades’ standing, a fellow democracy, a major investor in American manufacturing, and a country that was, at the time of the raid, in the middle of placing enormous bets on American industrial infrastructure.

The raid caused anger in Seoul and led some firms to “question their massive investments in the U.S.” That is the diplomatic equivalent of detaining your landlord’s relatives and then wondering why the boiler is suddenly unavailable for repair.

As Frankie Boyle might put it: “America spent seventy years telling the world it was the indispensable nation. It then detained the people building its cars and seemed genuinely surprised that this created paperwork.”

Neighbourhood Investigations: Coming Soon to a Suburb Near You

The policy escalations do not end with fees and raids. USCIS began conducting “neighbourhood investigations” in November 2025, described officially as verifying naturalization applicants’ “residency, moral character, loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, and commitment to the nation’s well-being.” Officers visit applicants’ neighbourhoods to assess whether they are sufficiently American to become American.

What a neighbourhood investigation looks like in practice — whether it involves ringing doorbells, interviewing the woman at number 42 about whether the applicant recycles correctly, or simply standing outside with a clipboard and an expression of national commitment — has not been fully explained. What it does suggest is that the United States has discovered the neighbourhood watch scheme and decided to weaponise it as immigration enforcement. Britain had neighbourhood watches in the 1980s. We used them to report stolen wheelbarrows and suspicious vans. We did not use them to assess constitutional loyalty. Even Thatcher thought that was a bit much.

Homeland Defenders: The Brand Extension Nobody Required

Crowning the entire enterprise is the Homeland Defenders — a new cadre of USCIS special agents, recruited via a hiring campaign that attracted more than 50,000 applications, described as “the highest in agency history.” The Homeland Defenders will investigate immigration violations, issue notices to appear, and “enforce immigration law” in ways that the USCIS director characterised as ensuring “integrity.”

The name “Homeland Defenders” is doing considerable work here. It implies that the homeland requires defending — from, presumably, the rural Ohio doctor on an H-1B and the Korean engineer at the Hyundai plant. Whether the homeland is materially safer once both have been processed is a question the name has been specifically designed to make you feel is impolite to ask.

In Britain, we have Border Force. It is a sensible name. It suggests that people are checking borders, which is the thing they are doing. It does not imply that the country is besieged. America has Homeland Defenders, which implies that the moment they clock off for lunch, something terrible will happen to the homeland. They have fifty thousand of them. The homeland, one assumes, is now quite thoroughly defended against a cardiologist from Chennai.

The Audit Panic Shuffle, American Edition

Meanwhile, the body shops and staffing fraudsters who generated the genuine H-1B abuse that makes enforcement necessary have, by all accounts, adapted with their customary agility. Duplicate lottery registrations dropped from over 400,000 in FY2024 to 7,828 in FY2026 — which sounds impressive until you consider that this means 7,828 people were still, despite everything, giving it a go. The strip-mall offices have new signage. The registered agents have new addresses. The family tree has new branches. The project starts next week.

The companies that committed genuine fraud are regrouping. The doctors in rural Ohio are calculating whether the $100,000 fee is claimable as a business expense. The Korean engineers are back in Seoul, reading the news. The Homeland Defenders are at their desks, defending the homeland from its paperwork.

And here in Britain, we are watching all of this with the quiet, exhausted affection that one reserves for a very large, very confident friend who keeps reinventing the wheel and calling it disruption. The wheel is round, America. It was always round. You don’t have to charge it a hundred thousand dollars to find that out.

The H-1B visa programme allows American employers to sponsor foreign workers in specialist occupations for three to six years, subject to an annual cap of 85,000 visas allocated by lottery. The Trump administration’s September 2025 proclamation introduced a mandatory $100,000 filing fee for new H-1B petitions. Project Firewall, launched by the Department of Labour in September 2025, initiated proactive enforcement against employer fraud and wage violations, generating a 48% increase in investigations and $15 million in assessed back wages by late 2025. USCIS began neighbourhood investigations of naturalisation applicants in November 2025. Hundreds of South Korean workers were detained at a Hyundai manufacturing facility in Georgia in September 2025, drawing diplomatic protests from Seoul. Duplicate H-1B lottery registrations dropped sharply from over 400,000 in FY2024 to under 8,000 in FY2026 following USCIS reforms. The programme remains in use by tens of thousands of legitimate employers annually.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]