The H-1B Hurdle: How to Build Your Tech Team in a Shifting U.S. Labor Market

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For many years, the H-1B visa has been a bridge that connected skilled engineers from around the world with teams in the United States. It has been part of countless personal plans, family decisions, and long-term career goals.

That bridge is now much harder to cross. In recent policy changes, U.S. employers may face a proposed additional federal fee of around 100,000 USD on certain new H-1B petitions. For many companies, this transforms a familiar process into a high-stakes financial and administrative decision, and it introduces new uncertainty for the people who were planning their future around it.

This is not just a budget line. It is the software engineer whose relocation is paused, the data scientist wondering whether to keep preparing for a move, and the product team in the U.S. that still needs expertise but now has far fewer predictable options.

The question for many organizations is no longer “H-1B or nothing.” It is “how do we work with global talent in a way that is stable, fair, and sustainable for both the business and the people involved?”

A Broader View of the Global Talent Pool

The difficulties with the H-1B process are pushing companies to think less about relocation and more about integration.

Instead of assuming that every key engineer must be physically in the U.S., some teams are shifting to a model where:

• The core leadership, product direction, and critical stakeholder roles remain in the U.S. or the main headquarters.
• Specialized engineering talent works remotely from their home countries, in stable, long-term roles, as part of one integrated product team.

In this model, a partner like unicrew provides dedicated teams aligned with your roadmap, ways of working, and culture, while the engineers remain employed in their own jurisdictions. The goal is not to replace local staff, but to give product and engineering leaders more options when local hiring or relocation is blocked or unpredictable.

For engineers who had aimed for an H-1B route, this approach does not magically replace that personal dream. It does, however, offer something important: the ability to do meaningful work for U.S. and European products, on long-term engagements, without having their career plans held hostage by policy changes.

Redirecting Resources Toward People and Product

When a single role involves substantial visa fees, legal costs, and relocation overhead, the total investment in that person’s first year can be very high. One response to that is to cut back on hiring altogether. Another is to rethink how that same budget could be used.

The example below illustrates the kind of difference companies may see when they compare a visa dependent hiring path with a dedicated remote professional. It is a simplified scenario for a senior engineer in a high cost U.S. metro area. Real numbers will vary.

These figures are not a universal formula. They are meant to show the order-of-magnitude difference that can arise when visa-specific costs are added to an already competitive salary.

The more important point is how that budget is used. For some companies, reallocating part of these funds can mean:

• Keeping existing U.S. staff and avoiding layoffs.
• Adding two or three remote specialists instead of a single visa-dependent hire.
• Investing more in product, security, or customer experience while still getting the skills they need.

One Team, Distributed: How the Model Works

A remote-first or hybrid model only works if people feel like they are part of one team rather than a separate outsourcing unit. That requires structure and discipline, not just a video link.

A typical dedicated team setup with unicrew looks like this:

• Shared rhythms and tools. Engineers participate in the same daily standups, planning sessions, reviews, and incident processes as your in-house team. Work flows through your tools, your backlog, and your engineering standards.
  
• Stable, long-term roles. The goal is not constant rotation of nameless resources. Engineers typically stay with the same product or platform for the long term, building context and owning outcomes, rather than jumping between unrelated short-term gigs.
  
• Clear employment model.  Engineers remain employees of unicrew in their home countries. We provide long-term dedicated teams as a managed service, not as U.S.-based employees of the client. This helps avoid legal and tax confusion around co-employment and permanent establishment, while still giving continuity and direct collaboration.
  
• Security and governance. Access to code, infrastructure, and data is controlled through your existing security practices, supported by our own internal policies and controls. We align with common enterprise expectations and support clients in meeting obligations under regulations such as GDPR, where applicable.

The outcome we aim for is simple: when someone joins a call, no one cares which company is on their payroll. They are just part of the product team.

Respecting the People Behind the Policy

Any discussion of “alternatives” to the H-1B process can easily slip into sounding like companies should simply bypass people who were planning that path and find cheaper talent elsewhere. That is not the intent here.

For many engineers, the H-1B route represented:

• A chance to join a specific company they admire.
• Access to a particular ecosystem or city.
• A personal milestone for themselves and their families.

Those goals are real and valid. Remote collaboration does not replace them. What it can do is:

• Provide a more stable, less fragile option for talented people in regions with strong engineering communities.
• Reduce the pressure to uproot their lives purely for the sake of working on interesting products.
• Give companies a way to keep working with global talent even when relocation is not possible.

In a more balanced world, companies will keep a mix of local hires, relocations where they make sense, and long-term remote contributors. All three matter.

How unicrew Fits Into This

At unicrew, our focus is on helping product and engineering leaders build resilient, long-term teams that combine local leadership with global talent.

In practice, that usually means:

• Starting with a small pilot collaboration so both sides can see how the communication, culture, and delivery feel in real work.
• Expanding the team only once there is clear mutual trust and a track record of outcomes.
• Keeping teams stable so that context, trust, and domain knowledge grow over time, instead of optimizing for short-term utilization.

If you are dealing with uncertainty around H-1B based hiring, or simply want a more diversified approach to your team structure, this model gives you another option to consider, without closing the door on relocations entirely.

Closing Thought and Important Disclaimer

Policy will continue to change. Fees may be adjusted, challenged, or restructured. Lottery mechanics may shift. None of that removes the need to ship product, support customers, and build sustainable careers for the people who do the work.

Remote first, globally distributed teams are not a silver bullet, but they are a practical way to keep moving forward while the ground under traditional relocation models keeps shifting.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only. It is not legal, tax, or immigration advice. Companies and individuals should consult qualified immigration counsel and other professional advisors for guidance on specific cases and the latest regulatory changes.