"A 9,900% tariff"

The research method is the first thing worth keeping: neither of them knows the story well, so they put ChatGPT’s voice mode on speaker and interview it on camera, web search on, follow-ups and all ▸ 53:04, Julia pressing on the exit-reentry question until the model corrects its own earlier vagueness. (Mid-interview the internet dies, the same failure that ate Meta’s launch demo, “me están cancelando”.)

The facts assembled: Trump announces a $100,000 annual fee on H1B visas, plus a million-dollar “gold card” residency ▸ 53:47. Current sponsor costs: a few hundred dollars, call it a thousand all-in ▸ 57:57. They make the model do the arithmetic out loud, from one thousand to one hundred thousand ▸ 58:13, the title’s ten-thousand-fold percentage ▸ 58:55. The consequence writes itself: the fee equals a full year of a worker’s salary paid up front, so ordinary foreign talent stops applying ▸ 59:39 and “los únicos que van a estar son los CEOs”, hires whose twenty years of experience justify the toll ▸ 1:00:53.

una tarifa igual al salario anual no filtra talento; lo elimina →

The personal layer is why the story reached them at all: a friend living in the US reads the pattern darkly, immigrants as the era’s scapegoat, and when told half-jokingly to move his money out, answers that it isn’t a bad idea, accounts have been frozen on populations before ▸ 1:03:42. For two founders whose whole Asia plan runs through visa regimes, the boss fight of this diary, the lesson is structural: immigration policy is pricing, and pricing can change by 9,900% in one announcement…