It's hard to know where to begin. While in the White House, Trump initiated his own crypto coin and quickly got billions of dollars in investments from people seeking favors. The most notable payoff along these lines was the government of Abu Dhabi, which got access to advanced computer chips after putting $2 billion into Trump's stablecoins.
Then there were the big contributors who had hundreds of millions of dollars of fines that were effectively forgiven. Last week, the New York Times reported on three major Trump contributors who had cases before the Securities and Exchange dropped which potentially could have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties. And then there is the case involving border czar Tom Homan, who took $50,000 in cash as part of an FBI sting operation. The Justice Department dropped the case, saying nothing to see here.
But these are all ad hoc acts of corruption. The real fun is when corruption is institutionalized. That is how we should understand Trump's proposal to charge $100,000 for each H-1B visa. While details of the proposal keep changing, like whether it is a one-time charge, whether it is assessed again at renewal after three years, or whether it is annual, the basic point is clear. Trump wants to charge companies a big chunk of money to bring in skilled foreign workers.
The visa plan includes the unsurprising provision that Trump will have the option to grant favored businesses an exemption from this fee. The cash registers at the White House are probably already running wild. It should be a huge potential bonanza for Trump and his family.
If the point is to prevent businesses from hiring foreign workers to undercut U.S. workers' pay, there are ways to achieve this goal that benefit workers rather than Donald Trump's pocketbook. For example, the government could raise the minimum pay for a worker on an H-1B visa from the current $60,000 to $100,000, or even higher. Remember, these are supposed to be highly skilled positions. The rules could also be changed to make it easier for H-1B workers to change jobs, in effect allowing them to take the best offer, just like any other worker. But there would be no money in these changes for Donald Trump.