Meghna Gupta*, a graduate from age 23, a few years of work in India, and a move to the United States before she turned 30 to settle there, had planned it all.
So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited until the promotion, which would have taken her to West Coast in California.
Now, Gupta is 29, and her dreams lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech firms have used for more than three decades to bring skilled workers to the US.
Companies that sponsor these applications have had significant new costs as a result of Trump’s decision to increase the fee for visas from about $2,000 to $60,000 in many cases. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60, 000. However, the minimum wage for the employer now increases to $ 160, 000, and in many cases, employers will likely find American workers with comparable skills for lower pay.
This is the Trump administration’s rationale as it presses US companies to hire local talent amid its larger anti-immigration policies. This is a blow, however, for the thousands of young people who are still enthralled by the American dream. And nowhere is that more so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, despite an economy that is growing faster than most other major nations, has still been bleeding skilled young people to developed nations.
Indian IT companies have sponsored the most H-1B visas of all companies for years, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and contracting out their expertise to other companies as well. This changed: In 2014, seven out of the 10 companies that received the most H-1B visas were Indian or started in India, In 2024, that number dropped to four.
In a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company in the top ten H-1B visa recipients in the first six months of 2025.
But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. In 2024, over 70% of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals, including those in the medical and tech sectors. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent.
Thousands of people in India are now concerned that the US is being blocked by this route.
“It has left me heartbroken”, Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump’s fee hike.
Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 in Uttarakhand, said, “I planned for this all my life. Everything revolved around this goal for me to move to the US.”
“The so-called ‘ American Dream ‘ looks like a cruel joke now”.
‘ In the hole ‘
Gupta’s crisis highlights a wider contradiction that currently defines India. On the one hand, the country — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention — is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
After surpassing Japan earlier this year, India currently has the fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, behind only China, India, and the US. But the country’s creation of new jobs lags far behind the number of young people who enter its workforce every year, widening its employment gap. The biggest cities in India are creaking as a result of inadequate public transportation, potholed roads, traffic jams, and growing income inequality.
The result: Millions like Gupta aspire to a life in the West, picking their career choices, usually in sectors like engineering or medicine, and working to get into hard-fought seats in top colleges – and then migrating. In India, there has been a significant increase in the migration of skilled professionals, particularly those in STEM fields, to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US in the past five years.
As per the Indian government’s data, those numbers rose from 94, 145 Indians in 2020 to 348, 629 by 2024 — a 270 percent rise.
Trump’s new visa system could now effectively close the entryway for those skilled workers. The fee hike comes on the back of a series of tension points in a souring US-India relationship in recent months. New Delhi is currently subject to a steep 50% tariff on US exports, half of which is used to purchase Russian crude, which the US claims is used to fund the Kremlin’s conflict in Ukraine.
Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian trade officer and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the new visa policy will be “the ones that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT services jobs, software developers, project managers, and back-end support in finance and healthcare”.
Sponsorship is unprofitable, especially for smaller businesses and startups, according to Srivastava, because for many of these positions, the new $100, 000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee’s annual salary. “The cost of hiring a foreign worker now exceeds local hiring by a wide margin”, he said, adding that this would shift the hiring calculus of US firms.
According to Srivastava, “American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-filling specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs.”
“The market has already priced in this pivot”, he said, citing the fall of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “as investors brace for shrinking US hiring”.
He argued that Indian STEM graduates and students “must completely reevaluate their career paths in the US.”
To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, a body with members across 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and distress among H-1B visa holders and other immigrant visa holders”.
According to Kaushik, “to remind them that they don’t belong.” “And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible”.
The announcement was made shortly after the new academic year’s start of classes, with many international students, including those from India, which sends the majority of foreign students to the US.
Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. According to an analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates, 41% of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 will still be residing in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent.
However, Kaushik claimed that their hotline has received more than 80 inquiries from students who are now concerned about what the future holds.
“They know that they’re already in the hole”, he said, referring to the tuition and other fees running into tens of thousands of dollars that they have invested in a US education, with increasingly unclear job prospects.
According to Srivastava of GTRI, the current US landscape reflects “less opportunities, tougher competition, and shrinking returns on US education.”
Nasscom, India’s apex IT trade body, has said the policy’s abrupt rollout could “potentially disrupt families” and the continuity of ongoing onshore projects for the country’s technology services firms.
The new policy, it added, could “ripple effects” on the global job markets and the US innovation ecosystem, noting that “additional cost will require adjustments” for businesses.
They “do not care about people at all.”
Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one in a chain of India’s most prestigious engineering school, and landed a job with Facebook soon after that.
He currently drives a BMW sedan to work while living with his wife in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, US. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas.
He was agitated by the White House news of last Saturday.
He spent that evening figuring out flights for his friends — Indians on H-1B visas who were out of the country, one in London, another in Bengaluru, India — to see if they could rush back to the US before the new rules kicked in on Sunday, as major US tech firms had recommended to their employees.
The Trump administration has since clarified that existing H-1B visas and renewals will not be subject to the new fees. For now, Ansh’s job and status in the US are secure.
He claimed that this isn’t much of a reassurance.
“In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India”, Ansh told Al Jazeera. However, people make those life changes because of this type of instability. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India”?
Ansh claimed that moving back to India, despite causing a dramatic change in their lives and plans, was at least something they should think about because they are not expecting, was at least something they should think about. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked?
The US government’s approach shows that they don’t care about people at all, he said. “These types of decisions are like … brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed”.
According to Ansh, the new visa policy also has a chance of causing the US to lose. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success”, he said.
He claimed that innovation won’t occur once talent is lost. “It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Everyone would benefit from its impact, in some way or another.
India’s conflict
After the announcement from the White House on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, said that the government was encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.
Some experts concurred with Mishra’s assertion that the H-1B visa suspension might offer an opportunity for India because it could theoretically stop the nation from experiencing the brain drain it has long experienced.
GTRI’s Srivastava said that US companies that have until now relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B might now explore more local hiring or offshore some jobs. According to him, “Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery because the $100, 000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive.”
“US postings will be reserved only for mission-critical roles, while the bulk of hiring and project execution shifts to India and other offshore hubs”, he told Al Jazeera. This “encouraging” reliance on offshore teams, which raises well-known questions about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination, is what US clients are seeing as costs rise.
Srivastava noted that India’s tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return.
But that won’t be simple. He said that even though hiring in India’s IT and services sector has been growing year-on-year, the gaps are real, ranging from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and data science. Additionally, returning students who have received US training should anticipate salaries that are well above Indian benchmarks.
And in reality, Kaushik said, many H-1B aspirants are looking at different countries as alternatives to the US — not India.
The senior engineer at Meta, Ansh, concurred. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology”, whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services.
Source: Aljazeera
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