Trump's H-1B Visa Fee Knocks Down A Bridge Between India And The US

Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been run by someone who grew up in India, immigrated with a specialised visa and proved their worth by rising to a top job in the Fortune 500.

Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Google's parent company, moved to the United States on the H-1B visa program, as did Indra Nooyi, who ran PepsiCo from 2006 to 2018.

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that every new H-1B application would come with a $100,000 price tag, a huge rise from the few thousands of dollars it cost before, sowing distress and confusion among workers and employers. The fee, which took effect Sunday, has upended the system's long-term prospects, not least for workers in India, who have long accounted for a majority of H-1B holders.

Any non-American who meets certain criteria is eligible for the visa - provided they bring“a body of highly specialised knowledge” needed by a U.S. employer - but Indians are in a league of their own. They won 71% of H-1B visas in the 2024 lottery, and a similar proportion since the program started in 1990. Applicants from China are a distant second, accounting for about 12 per cent of the visas.

There were more than 300,000 Indians working in the United States on an H-1B visa as of 2024. They, along with their spouses and children, made up about a tenth of all Indian-origin people who reside in the country legally. Possibly millions of Indian Americans, including many living in India, owe their U.S. citizenship to their own or their parents' use of the program.

No one can yet gauge the full effects of the fee. An initial panic among current visa holders subsided after the Trump administration clarified that the new rules would apply only to new applicants.

But there is no doubt that by making it 20 to 30 times more expensive for US companies to hire workers from India that Trump has scrambled a popular path between the two countries.

The move could dent India's economy by reducing how many H1-B holders send money home and, longer term, by weakened ties between Indian and American companies.

“These visas give Indians substantial exposure to the US, its professional culture and its soft power,” said Alexander Slater, managing director at Capstone, a global forecasting and business strategy firm in Washington.“If the outcome of the policy change is that fewer Indians are working with Americans, it will weaken a significant bond between the two countries.”

And for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, already dazed by Trump's trade war, it's another headache-inducing twist in the topsy-turvy relationship with the United States.

At the signing of the executive order on the visa fee on Friday, Howard Lutnick, the U.S. commerce secretary, said the move would press U.S. companies to hire more American workers.“That's the point of immigration: hire Americans, and make sure the people coming in are the top, top people,” he said.

The first wrinkle in the plan could be a mismatch between the world's supply and demand of tech workers. As American tech companies have grown into globe-spanning behemoths, India has been producing far more engineers and other scientific specialists than any other country, trained in English.

“India has an engineering fetish because it had a Soviet fetish” during the Cold War, said Vinay Sitapati of Shiv Nadar University in Chennai. The newly independent country wanted a generation of engineers to build a modern nation from the ground up, said Sitapati, who is writing a book about Indian Americans with Dinsha Mistree of Stanford University. More recently, many of India's STEM graduates have ended up in the United States and other highly developed economies.

The United States issues 85,000 H-1B visas via a lottery each year. The visas are good for three years and renewable for up to six. The jobs that holders take tend to pay well, but studies show that most first-year visa winners earn less than the $100,000 that their employers will now have to fork over. Some 427,000 H-1B petitions were received in 2024.

A professional from India who has been working on Wall Street under a series of H-1Bs for more than a dozen years, but was not authorized to speak publicly, said that he started with a job that paid less than $80,000 a year, though he now earned much more. His guess was that there will be significantly fewer applications for people like him.

The higher cost will be borne by applicants and the companies seeking to hire them. India's Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS, was the second-biggest user of H-1B visa holders' labor this year, after Amazon. Along with Infosys, Wipro and other Indian IT services firms, TCS maintains a robust business sending employees with Indian passports to work on projects in America. The share prices of these Indian companies fell Monday over fears that they would not be able to retain those revenues.

India's tech giants have already reduced their reliance on H-1Bs, anticipating a rise in political resistance to migrant labor, the possibility of artificial intelligence doing more work and developed economies offshoring more professional jobs to workers in India, especially around the southern city of Bengaluru.

Other parts of South India that benefited from the era of relatively cheap H-1B visas could be hit harder. Anna University in Chennai and Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad were awarded hundreds of visas for their graduates every year, even more than the country's prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

One temple in Hyderabad, dedicated to the god Balaji, is a mandatory stop for Hindu visa applicants on their way to interviews at the U.S. consulate there. Revanth Reddy, the chief minister of Telangana state, of which Hyderabad is the capital and Telugu the main language, wrote on the social platform X that“the suffering for our Telugu techies will be unimaginable” with Trump's orders. He implored Modi to protect“the interests of our tech population and skilled workers.”

Modi went on national television on Sunday evening to speak about India's economy. Scheduled at the last minute, the official occasion for his speech was a revision of the country's consumer taxes, which coincides with a nine-day Hindu festival. He promised that the new rates would feel like a“festival of savings” for Indian families.

Against the backdrop of a 50% US tariff on Indian goods, and with the H-1B now in peril, it was tough to sustain a festive mood. Instead, Modi reverted to talking about how India must become self-sufficient economically, a patriotic throwback to its early days as a postcolonial republic.“Everyone should be proud to say: 'I sell Indian-made goods. I buy Indian-made,'” he said.

But asking India to disengage from the global economy is a tall order. A generation of Indians went to the United States to enrich themselves in ways they could not at home, and American companies were enriched in ways they could not have achieved without them.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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