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'Cruel joke': How Indian H-1B dreams are crash landing after Trump fee hike

New Delhi, India -- Meghna Gupta* had planned it all - a master's degree by 23, a few years of working in India, and then a move to the United States before she turned 30 to eventually settle there. 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 to get to the promotion that would mean a stint on California's West Coast. 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. Trump's decision to increase the fee for the visas from about $2,000, in many cases, to $100,000 has imposed dramatic new costs on companies that sponsor these applications. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60,000. But the employer's cost now rises to $160,000 at the minimum, and in many cases, companies will likely find American workers with similar 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. But for thousands of young people around the world still captivated by the American dream, this is a blow. 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. For years, Indian IT companies themselves sponsored the most H-1B visas of all firms, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and then contractually outsourcing their expertise to other businesses, too. 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. And in the first six months of 2025, Gupta's TCS was the only Indian company in the top-10 H-1B visa recipients, in a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple. But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. More than 70 percent of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals in 2024, ranging from the tech sector to medicine. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent. Now, thousands across India fear that this pathway to the US is being slammed shut. "It has left me heartbroken," Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump's fee hike. "All my life, I planned for this; everything circled around this goal for me to move to the US," said Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 people in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. "The so-called 'American Dream' looks like a cruel joke now." Gupta's crisis reflects a broader contradiction that defines India today. On the one hand, the country -- as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention -- is the world's fastest-growing major economy. India today boasts the world's fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), behind just the US, China and Germany, after it passed Japan earlier this year. 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. India's biggest cities are creaking under inadequate public infrastructure, potholed roads, traffic snarls 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 the last five years, India has witnessed a drastic rise in the outflow of skilled professionals, particularly in STEM fields, who migrate to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US. 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 regime could now effectively close the pipeline of those skilled workers into the US. 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 also currently facing a steep 50 percent tariff on its exports to the US -- half of that for buying Russian crude, which the US says is funding the Kremlin's war on 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". For many of these positions, the new $100,000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee's annual salary, making sponsorship uneconomical, especially for smaller firms and startups, said Srivastava. "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. "American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-to-fill specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs," said Srivastava. "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". Indian STEM graduates and students, he said, "have to rethink US career plans altogether". 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". "To remind them that they don't belong," Kaushik told Al Jazeera. "And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible." The announcement came soon after the start of the new academic session, when many international students - including from India, which sends the largest cohort of foreign students to the US - have begun classes. Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. An analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates suggests that 41 percent of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 were still in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent. But Kaushik said he has received more than 80 queries on their hotline for students now worried 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. The landscape in the US today, Srivastava of GTRI said, represents "fewer 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 have "ripple effects" on the US innovation ecosystem and global job markets, pointing out that for companies, "additional cost will require adjustments". 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 now lives with his wife in Menlo Park, in the heart of the US's Silicon Valley, and drives a BMW sedan to work. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas. Last Saturday's news from the White House left him rattled. 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. Since then, the Trump administration has clarified that the new fees will not apply to existing H-1B visas or renewals. For now, Ansh's job and status in the US are secure. But this is little reassurance, he said. "In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India," Ansh told Al Jazeera. "But this sort of instability triggers people to make those life changes. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India?" Because he and his wife do not have children, Ansh said that a move back to India -- while a dramatic rupture in their lives and plans -- was at least something they could consider. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked? "The way this has been done by the US government shows that they do not care for people at all," he said. "These types of decisions are like ... brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed." Ansh believes that the US also stands to lose from the new visa policy. "The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US's success," he said. "Once talent goes away, innovation won't happen," he said. "It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Its impact would reach everyone, one way or the other." 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. Mishra's comments were in tune with some experts who have suggested that the disruption in the H-1B visa policy could serve as an opportunity for India -- as it could, in theory, stanch the brain drain that the country has long suffered from. 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. "The $100,000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive, so Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery," he said. "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. "For US clients, this means higher dependence on offshore teams -- raising familiar concerns about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination -- even as costs climb." Srivastava noted that India's tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return. But that won't be easy. 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. And US-trained returnees would expect salaries 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. Ansh, the senior engineer at Meta, agreed. "In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology," whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services. "The Indian ecosystem is not at the pace where you innovate the next big thing in the world," he said. "It is, in fact, far from there."

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