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President Trump took his most extensive step yet toward overhauling the U.S. legal migration system, with a pair of proclamations that explicitly favor the wealthiest of the world’s prospective expat workers.

Trump on Friday imposed a $100,000 application fee on the widely used H-1B visa program, a move that would drastically increase the cost of visas heavily coveted by some of America’s largest companies — including in the Silicon Valley — seeking to bring in skilled workers from abroad.

The president also unveiled a “Trump Gold Card” visa program — under which, for the price of $1 million, immigrants could get U.S. residency. Businesses could buy residency permits for $2 million per employee, while a new “platinum”-level card set to be issued soon would cost $5 million and allow the holder to come to the U.S. for up to 270 days a year without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.

The restrictions and fees go into effect on Sunday.

It all amounts to a plan for a new gilded age of immigration to America, where those with the resources to invest are welcomed along with their wallets — while at the same time new barriers to entry are erected for those with lesser means and others seen as taking away jobs that could be occupied by U.S. citizens.

The pomp with which Trump announced the programs echoed the theme — over his right shoulder as he spoke to reporters in the Oval Office was an image of a gold card with his face on it along with traditional American images including a bald eagle, all in gold.

It’s a stark shift from America’s stance toward immigration historically, which welcomed those of various economic backgrounds coming to the country legally in search of a better life and more freedom.

‘Significant disadvantage’

Yet even while Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick mused about the prospects of a windfall for the U.S. Treasury that could total $100 billion or more, immigration attorneys cautioned that a move of this magnitude would cause major disruptions — several of them potentially very expensive to the U.S. economy.

Cleveland-based lawyer David Leopold warned that Trump’s H-1B changes, including the $100,000 fee, would “effectively kill the program.”

“Who’s going to pay $100,000 for a petition? Unless you want to make this an exclusive program for extremely rich people,” said Leopold, a partner at UB Greensfelder, whose clients include physicians on H-1Bs.

Accenture, Cognizant Technology and other IT consulting stocks hit session lows on Friday on the news of the visa fee.

“This is a senseless, terrible policy for financial services firms that makes American firms less competitive in the global market for talent,” said Alexis DuFresne, founder of recruiting firm Archer Search Partners.

DuFresne warned that while some mega funds won’t be daunted by the prospect of a new six-figure fee to import top talent, “it will have a substantial impact at the margins — with mid-sized firms, smaller firms, and up-and-coming, younger talent at a significant disadvantage.”

“We have had clients who have said in the past, prior to this announcement, that they do not want to have to sponsor a visa. We anticipate that that will become a more prevalent part of our conversations with clients and their goalposts going forward.”

A feature, not a bug

Some of that sentiment, if it comes to pass, may be seen by this administration as an asset rather than a problem.

Senior members of Trump’s administration have repeatedly complained — in blunt terms — that too many immigrants are taking American jobs.

In a fact sheet, the White House said American workers are being replaced with lower-paid foreign labor and called it a national security threat. The dynamic is suppressing wages and disincentivizing Americans from choosing careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the White House said.

Trump’s proclamation does anticipate a scenario whereby it can work around the new costs if they became a major burden, allowing for case-by-case exemptions if deemed to be in the national interest. That provision opens a potential window for certain companies or industries to seek an exception to the new fee.

Nonetheless, the intention to skew the H-1B program toward higher-paying jobs is clear.

Trump also plans to order the Labor secretary to undertake a rule-making process to revise prevailing-wage levels for the program, a move intended to limit the use of visas to undercut wages that would otherwise be paid to workers who are U.S. citizens.

Legal risks

Courts may also scrutinize the expansive new fees.

The H-1B $100,000 application fee in particular is at risk of being struck down as “excessive,” said Becky Fu von Trapp, an immigration lawyer in Stowe, Vt. That’s because federal law allows agencies to charge enough to recoup reasonable costs, and most work visa applications currently cost about $5,000. Even the most complex ones, for certain investment visas, usually run less than $10,000 in total.

The move could also incentivize technology firms and other companies reliant on foreign workers to set up offices outside the U.S. to avoid the application fee and associated hassles.

“Companies will reassess the need of who they really need to bring to U.S. and who can be based in Canada or Singapore, where they still have good technology infrastructure and can work remotely,” she said.

The move may also have a chilling effect on international students seeking admission to U.S. universities, since many of them hope to find jobs through the H-1B process upon graduation, she said.

Congress will also weigh in, Lutnick said, noting that lawmakers must also approve the planned platinum card program. He predicted that could happen later this year.

That’s easier said than done.

Republicans only narrowly control the House and the Senate. Immigration has been a particularly challenging issue to legislate for the GOP in years past, sparking clashes between the pro-business wing of the party that wants more high-skilled immigrants to come in, and another group far more skeptical of immigration as a whole who’ve sought to limit new arrivals no matter where they come from.

What’s more, Democrats are broadly furious about the president’s stepped-up immigration enforcement including aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in major U.S. cities including Los Angeles. As such, they have little incentive to cooperate without demanding wholesale reversals of Trump’s existing immigration policies, which he almost surely wouldn’t accept.

Wingrove and Soper write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg reporters Katia Porzecanski and Hema Parmar contributed to this report.

How do we remember war, and who gets remembered? In this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, Step Vaessen speaks to Sabina Tanovic, a Sarajevo-born expert in memorial architecture. From the genocide in Srebrenica to the destruction in Gaza, Tanovic explores how monuments shape justice, history, and collective healing.

WASHINGTON — Debate over President Trump’s sweeping budget-and-policy package is over on Capitol Hill. Now the argument goes national.

From the Central Valley of California to Midwestern battlegrounds and suburban districts of the northeast, the new law already is shaping the 2026 midterm battle for control of the House of Representatives. The outcome will set the tone for Trump’s final two years in the Oval Office.

Democrats need a net gain of three House seats to break the GOP’s chokehold on Washington and reestablish a power center to counter Trump. There’s added pressure to flip the House because midterm Senate contests are concentrated in Republican-leaning states, making it harder for Democrats to reclaim that chamber.

As Republicans see it, they’ve now delivered broad tax cuts, an unprecedented investment in immigration enforcement and new restraints on social safety net programs. Democrats see a law that rolls back health insurance access and raises costs for middle-class Americans while cutting taxes mostly for the rich, curtailing green energy initiatives and restricting some workers’ organizing rights.

“It represents the broken promise they made to the American people,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Washington Democrat who chairs the party’s House campaign arm. “We’re going to continue to hold Republicans accountable for this vote.”

Parties gear up for a fight

Whether voters see it that way will be determined on a district-by-district level, but the battle will be more intense in some places than others. Among the 435 House districts, only 69 contests were decided by less than 10 percentage points in the 2024 general election.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has identified 26 Democratic-held seats it must defend vigorously, along with 35 GOP-held seats it believes could be ripe to flip. Republicans’ campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, has listed 18 GOP incumbents as priorities, plus two districts opened by retirements.

There are a historically low number of so-called crossover districts: Only 13 Democrats represent districts that Trump carried in 2024, while just three Republicans serve districts that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried.

Both committees are busy recruiting challengers and open-seat candidates, and more retirements could come, so the competitive map will evolve. Still, there are clusters of districts guaranteed to influence the national result.

California, despite its clear lean to Democrats statewide, has at least nine House districts expected to be up for grabs: three in the Central Valley and six in Southern California. Six are held by Democrats, three by the GOP.

Pennsylvania features four districts that have been among the closest U.S. House races for several consecutive cycles. They include a suburban Philadelphia seat represented by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, one of just two House Republicans to vote against Trump’s bill and one of the three GOP lawmakers from a district Harris won. Fitzpatrick cited the Medicaid cuts.

Vice President JD Vance plans on Wednesday to be in Republican Rep. Robert Bresnahan’s northwest Pennsylvania district to tout the GOP package. Bresnahan’s seat is a top Democratic target.

Iowa and Wisconsin, meanwhile, feature four contiguous GOP-held districts in farm-heavy regions where voters could be swayed by fallout from Trump’s tariffs.

Democrats fight to define the GOP

Beyond bumper-sticker labels — Trump’s preferred “Big Beautiful Bill” versus Democrats’ “Big Ugly Bill” retort — the 900-page law is, in fact, an array of policies with varying effects.

Democrats hammer Medicaid and food assistance cuts, some timed to take full effect only after the 2026 midterms, along with Republicans’ refusal to extend tax credits to some people who obtained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law; 3 million more would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.

“Folks will die here in Louisiana and in other parts of the country,” House Minority Leader Jeffries warned last week during a town hall in Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

Jeffries singled out vulnerable Republicans such as California Rep. David Valadao of Hanford, who represents a heavily agricultural Central Valley district where more than half of the population is eligible for the joint state-federal insurance program. California allows immigrants with legal status and those who are undocumented to qualify for Medicaid, so not all Medicaid recipients are voters. But the program helps finance the overall healthcare system, including nursing homes and hospitals.

Republicans highlight the law’s tightened work requirements for Medicaid enrollees. They argue that it’s a popular provision that will strengthen the program.

“I voted for this bill because it does preserve the Medicaid program for its intended recipients — children, pregnant women, the disabled, and elderly,” Valadao said. “I know how important the program is for my constituents.”

Republicans hope voters see lower taxes

The law includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. It makes permanent existing rates and brackets approved during Trump’s first term. Republicans and their allies have hammered vulnerable Democrats for “raising costs” on American households by opposing the bill.

GOP campaign aides point to the popularity of individual provisions: boosting the $2,000 child tax credit to $2,200 (some families at lower income levels would not get the full credit), new deductions on tip and overtime income and auto loans; and a new deduction for older adults earning less than $75,000 a year.

“Everyone will have more take-home pay. They’ll have more jobs and opportunity,” Johnson said in a Fox News Sunday interview. “The economy will be doing better and we’ll be able to point to that as the obvious result of what we did.”

Democrats note that the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s tax code are wealthy Americans and corporations. Pairing that with safety net cuts, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz concluded, “The cruelty is the point.”

Immigration, meanwhile, was Trump’s strongest issue in 2024. NRCC aides say that will continue with the new law’s investments in immigration enforcement. Democrats believe that the Trump administration has overplayed its hand with its push for mass deportation.

Playing the Trump card

The president is a titanic variable.

Democrats point to 2018, when they notched a 40-seat net gain in House seats to take control away from the GOP. This year, Democrats have enjoyed a double-digit swing in special elections around the country when compared with 2024 presidential results. Similar trends emerged in 2017 after Trump’s 2016 victory. Democrats say that reflects voter discontent with Trump once he’s actually in charge.

Republicans answer that Trump’s job approval remains higher at this point than in 2017. But the GOP’s effort is further complicated by ongoing realignments: Since Trump’s emergence, Democrats have gained affluent white voters — like those in suburban swing districts — while Trump has drawn more working-class voters across racial and ethnic groups. But Republicans face a stiffer challenge of replicating Trump’s coalition in a midterm election without him on the ballot.

Democrats, meanwhile, must corral voters who are not a threat to vote for Republicans but could stay home.

Jeffries said he’s determined not to let that happen: “We’re going to do everything we can until we end this national nightmare.”

Barrow, Cooper and Brook write for the Associated Press. Cooper reported from Phoenix and Brook reported from New Orleans. AP reporters Michael Blood in Los Angeles and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON  — When Nancy Pelosi first held the speaker’s gavel in 2007, liberals in her caucus wanted to impeach President Bush over the Iraq war. Pelosi resisted.

More than a decade later, the San Francisco Democrat returned to the speaker’s rostrum with a new Democratic majority, hearing similar calls to impeach a Republican president.

This time, too, she resisted for months. But President Trump, she insists, left her no choice.

Trump’s offenses, she said in an interview Tuesday in the speaker’s office, justified impeachment in a way Bush’s had not.

“What could be worse than that? Misrepresenting to the public what the basis of the war was,” Pelosi said. But, she continued, Trump’s efforts to enlist a foreign government, Ukraine, in domestic U.S. politics, asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals, “is so overwhelming that for us to not do this would be a dereliction of our own duties.”

The process Pelosi set in motion when she said the House would begin the impeachment is now on the eve of completion. Lawmakers are scheduled to open debate Wednesday on an impeachment resolution that is all but certain to pass on a near-party-line vote.

With that vote, impeachment will stand as a key part of her legacy, her colleagues agree — along with becoming the country’s first female speaker of the House and shepherding the Affordable Care Act into law.

Republicans, who have defended the president, say the impeachment effort will put the Democratic majority at risk.

The impeachment vote “will be a stain on Nancy Pelosi’s legacy as speaker,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), denouncing what he called “a personal vendetta against the president.”

Pelosi’s allies paint a very different picture.

“All this is coming out now because, as Nancy says, ‘the times have found us,’” said former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a friend of Pelosi’s. “The times have found her.”

In the eyes of Democrats, Boxer added, the speaker has become “the chief antagonist or the chief opponent to the man who has taken a wrecking ball to America.”

That position wasn’t ordained a year ago.

When Pelosi’s party regained the majority after the 2018 election, a small but vocal faction of Democrats were calling for her to step aside. Her initial months back in the speaker’s office were marked by tension between progressives and moderates among the sometimes unruly House Democrats.

Members on the party’s left “were rambunctious; they assumed the caucus would get in their way. So they spoke out,” said former Rep. George Miller, a longtime ally of Pelosi’s.

Paradoxically, however, impeachment, which many saw as a divisive issue, has caused Pelosi’s party to coalesce around her. Critics who just a year ago said she should step aside have put their trust in her political instincts, saying the House would have been rolled by Trump under a less powerful speaker.

And to the surprise of some Democrats, who considered her out of touch with a younger generation in the party, Pelosi has become a pop culture symbol of Democratic resistance by standing up to the president on live television or even just by walking out of the White House in a fashionable coat.

“In her whole career, she has always prided herself on being measured. But the times she has stepped out of that measured status have been blockbusters,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), a Pelosi ally. “I think she has found a newer voice — to be used sparingly but effectively.”

Pelosi has insisted all along that Democrats are not impeaching Trump because of politics. Disagreements over separation of children from their families at the border, gun control or climate change need to be resolved at the ballot box, she said.

“Impeachment, politics — [they] have nothing to do with each other,” she repeated in the interview.

But politics is an inevitable part of impeachment. If Democrats hold the House majority in November and defeat Trump for reelection, Pelosi’s management of the process will garner political credit. If they fail, she will take much of the blame. In the year ahead, preserving the House’s Democratic majority will be her top political responsibility.

She insists the prospect doesn’t worry her.

“We’re on a good path with all of that. If impeachment never existed, we would still have to be protecting our incumbents,” she said.

One measure of Pelosi’s effectiveness: She has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin. The president once avoided personal attacks on Pelosi, but in recent weeks has dropped that deference, repeatedly referring to her as “crazy,” and recently insulting her teeth.

On Tuesday, in a vitriolic six-page letter, he accused her of lying about her faith.

“You are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the President,’ when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense,” Trump wrote.

“You are making a mockery of impeachment, and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans,” he wrote.

Pelosi said she has prayed for whoever the president is and has felt it important to say that publicly.

“I don’t hate anybody. And if I were to ever resort to such an emotion, I wouldn’t waste it on him,” she said in the interview. “It is not something that’s in my upbringing or my character.”

Pelosi’s allies say she attends Roman Catholic Mass regularly, including on foreign trips with other lawmakers. Last weekend she went with Republicans and Democrats to Mass at St. Alphonse Church in Luxembourg.

“I prayed for [Trump] that God — that his heart will receive God’s grace to help everyone in our country, not just the privileged few, which seems to be the course that he is on,” Pelosi said.

The decision to open an impeachment inquiry came after a hectic weekend in late September filled with church services — a memorial for Pelosi’s longtime friend, journalist Cokie Roberts, and the funeral for Emily Clyburn, the wife of House Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. As Pelosi flew from Washington to South Carolina and then to New York, she drafted the speech she would give announcing the decision — at one point losing her notes on a plane.

The announcement on Sept. 24 came before television cameras in a hallway off the speaker’s office — a space typically reserved for high-level announcements. From there, she sent the investigation to six House committees, primarily the House Intelligence Committee that she once helped lead, now headed by her close ally, Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank).

Schiff said Pelosi was “deeply engaged” in the investigation but “never attempted to micromanage.”

“What she has done is consult with the chairs of the various committees, and try to arrive at consensus,” he said.

Pelosi succeeded in bridging disputes among Democrats over how broad the articles of impeachment should be — and how quickly to move. Democrats close to her describe a process of constant communication with members, whether on the phone or in person on the House floor. That has allowed her to act as a barometer, measuring the pressure on the lawmakers.

“I know people think she goes up there and cracks the whip,” said John Lawrence, who was Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005 to 2013. “That’s just not the case.”

She “derives her strength from the fact people believe — regardless whether the final decision reflects personal preference — they were able to make their case and had opportunity to be consulted.”

Pelosi, however, has also developed a level of support among Democratic voters that she did not have a year ago, when even many Democrats conceded that she was an electoral liability in some congressional districts. By wagging her finger at the president during a meeting in the Oval Office and merely exiting the White House in a stylish orange coat, she has become the subject of memes and political logos.

Those moments were spontaneous, she says.

“All of them [are] a part of something vis-a-vis him,” she said. “It was really more about him than about me.”

She didn’t wear the burnt-orange coat with a collar — one that she bought for the inauguration of Barack Obama — to make a point, she said.

“No, it was clean, it was warm,” she said. “Being from California, I don’t have many real winter coats.”

Pelosi has said she considered retirement when it appeared Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016. When Trump won, she stayed on to protect the Affordable Care Act, the piece of legislation Pelosi counts as her top legislative accomplishment.

She refused to speculate on whether she would once again think of stepping down if a Democrat wins in 2020.

“I have no intention of weakening the position I’m in now by making myself a lame duck for what comes next,” she said. “When that comes, we’ll see.”

But when the day comes, there’s little chance she’d remain in Washington as many former politicians do, she says.

“Every single day that I leave,” she said of her San Francisco district, “it’s enticing to stay in California.”