New Delhi, India — Meghna Gupta* had deliberate all of it – a grasp’s diploma by 23, a number of years of working in India, after which a transfer to the US earlier than she turned 30 to finally settle there.
So, she clocked numerous hours on the Hyderabad workplace of Tata Consultancy Providers (TCS), India’s largest IT agency and a driver of the nation’s emergence as the worldwide outsourcing powerhouse within the sector. She waited to get to the promotion that might imply a stint on California’s West Coast.
Now, Gupta is 29, and her goals lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech companies have used for greater than three a long time to carry expert staff to the US.
Trump’s choice to extend the price for the visas from about $2,000, in lots of circumstances, to $100,000 has imposed dramatic new prices on corporations that sponsor these purposes. The bottom wage an H-1B visa worker is meant to be paid is $60,000. However the employer’s value now rises to $160,000 on the minimal, and in lots of circumstances, corporations will possible discover American staff with comparable abilities for decrease pay.
That is the Trump administration’s rationale because it presses US corporations to rent native expertise amid its bigger anti-immigration insurance policies. However for 1000’s of younger individuals all over the world nonetheless captivated by the American dream, it is a blow. And nowhere is that extra so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, regardless of an economic system that’s rising sooner than most different main nations, has nonetheless been bleeding expert younger individuals to developed nations.
For years, Indian IT corporations themselves sponsored essentially the most H-1B visas of all companies, utilizing them to carry Indian staff to the US after which contractually outsourcing their experience to different companies, too. This modified: In 2014, seven out of the ten corporations that acquired essentially the most H-1B visas have been Indian or began in India; In 2024, that quantity dropped to 4.
And within the first six months of 2025, Gupta’s TCS was the one Indian firm within the top-10 H-1B visa recipients, in a listing in any other case dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.
However what had not modified till now was the demographic of the employees that even the above US corporations employed on H-1B visas. Greater than 70 p.c of all H-1B visas have been granted to Indian nationals in 2024, starting from the tech sector to drugs. Chinese language nationals have been a distant second, with lower than 12 p.c.
Now, 1000’s throughout India worry that this pathway to the US is being slammed shut.
“It has left me heartbroken,” Gupta instructed Al Jazeera of Trump’s price hike.
“All my life, I deliberate for this; every part circled round this objective for me to maneuver to the US,” mentioned Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a city of 10,000 individuals within the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
“The so-called ‘American Dream’ appears to be like like a merciless joke now.”
‘Within the gap’
Gupta’s disaster displays a broader contradiction that defines India as we speak. On the one hand, the nation — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his authorities incessantly point out — is the world’s fastest-growing main economic system.
India as we speak boasts the world’s fourth-largest gross home product (GDP), behind simply the US, China and Germany, after it handed Japan earlier this yr. However the nation’s creation of recent jobs lags far behind the variety of younger individuals who enter its workforce yearly, widening its employment hole. India’s largest cities are creaking below insufficient public infrastructure, potholed roads, visitors snarls and rising earnings inequality.
The consequence: Tens of millions like Gupta aspire to a life within the West, selecting their profession decisions, normally in sectors like engineering or drugs, and dealing to get into hard-fought seats in high schools – after which migrating. Within the final 5 years, India has witnessed a drastic rise within the outflow of expert professionals, notably in STEM fields, who migrate to international locations like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
As per the Indian authorities’s information, these numbers rose from 94,145 Indians in 2020 to 348,629 by 2024 — a 270 p.c rise.
Trump’s new visa regime might now successfully shut the pipeline of these expert staff into the US. The price hike comes on the again of a sequence of stress factors in a souring US-India relationship in current months. New Delhi can also be at present going through a steep 50 p.c tariff on its exports to the US — half of that for purchasing Russian crude, which the US says is funding the Kremlin’s struggle on Ukraine.
Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian commerce officer and founding father of the World Commerce Analysis Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based suppose tank, instructed Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the brand new visa coverage shall be “those that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT companies jobs, software program builders, mission managers, and back-end help in finance and healthcare”.
For a lot of of those positions, the brand new $100,000 price exceeds an entry-level worker’s annual wage, making sponsorship uneconomical, particularly for smaller companies and startups, mentioned Srivastava. “The price of hiring a overseas employee now exceeds native hiring by a large margin,” he mentioned, including that this could shift the hiring calculus of US companies.
“American companies will scout extra home expertise, reserve H-1Bs for less than the hardest-to-fill specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or different hubs,” mentioned Srivastava.
“The market has already priced on this pivot,” he mentioned, citing the autumn of Indian inventory markets since Trump’s announcement, “as buyers brace for shrinking US hiring”.
Indian STEM graduates and college students, he mentioned, “should rethink US profession plans altogether”.
To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founding father of the North American Affiliation of Indian College students, a physique with members throughout 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and misery amongst H-1B visa holders and different immigrant visa holders”.
“To remind them that they don’t belong,” Kaushik instructed Al Jazeera. “And at any time, at any whim, the potential for remaining in the US can turn out to be extremely troublesome and excruciatingly unattainable.”
The announcement got here quickly after the beginning of the brand new tutorial session, when many worldwide college students – together with from India, which sends the biggest cohort of overseas college students to the US – have begun courses.
Usually, a big chunk of such college students keep again within the US for work after graduating. An evaluation of the Nationwide Survey of Faculty Graduates means that 41 p.c of worldwide college students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 have been nonetheless within the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that determine jumps to 75 p.c.
However Kaushik mentioned he has acquired greater than 80 queries on their hotline for college kids now apprehensive about what the longer term holds.
“They know that they’re already within the gap,” he mentioned, referring to the tutoring and different charges operating into tens of 1000’s of {dollars} that they’ve invested in a US schooling, with more and more unclear job prospects.
The panorama within the US as we speak, Srivastava of GTRI mentioned, represents “fewer alternatives, more durable competitors, and shrinking returns on US schooling”.
Nasscom, India’s apex IT commerce physique, has mentioned the coverage’s abrupt rollout might “probably disrupt households” and the continuity of ongoing onshore initiatives for the nation’s expertise companies companies.
The brand new coverage, it added, might have “ripple results” on the US innovation ecosystem and world job markets, stating that for corporations, “further value would require changes”.
‘They don’t take care of individuals in any respect’
Ansh*, a senior software program engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Know-how (IIT), one in a sequence of India’s most prestigious engineering college, and landed a job with Fb quickly after that.
He now lives along with his spouse in Menlo Park, within the coronary heart of the US’s Silicon Valley, and drives a BMW sedan to work. Each Ansh and his spouse are within the US on H-1B visas.
Final Saturday’s information from the White Home left him rattled.
He spent that night determining flights for his mates — Indians on H-1B visas who have been in another country, one in London, one other in Bengaluru, India — to see if they may rush again to the US earlier than the brand new guidelines kicked in on Sunday, as main US tech companies had beneficial to their staff.
Since then, the Trump administration has clarified that the brand new charges is not going to apply to current H-1B visas or renewals. For now, Ansh’s job and standing within the US are safe.
However that is little reassurance, he mentioned.
“Within the final 11 years, I’ve by no means felt like going again to India,” Ansh instructed Al Jazeera. “However this kind of instability triggers individuals to make these life modifications. And now we’re right here, questioning if one ought to return to India?”
As a result of he and his spouse would not have kids, Ansh mentioned {that a} transfer again to India — whereas a dramatic rupture of their lives and plans — was no less than one thing they may take into account. However what of his colleagues and mates on H-1B visas, who’ve kids, he requested?
“The way in which this has been completed by the US authorities exhibits that they don’t take care of individuals in any respect,” he mentioned. “All these choices are like … mind wave strikes, after which it’s simply executed.”
Ansh believes that the US additionally stands to lose from the brand new visa coverage. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success,” he mentioned.
“As soon as expertise goes away, innovation gained’t occur,” he mentioned. “It’ll have long-term penalties for visa holders and their households. Its influence would attain everybody, in some way.”
India’s battle
After the announcement from the White Home on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, mentioned that the federal government was encouraging Indians working overseas to return to the nation.
Mishra’s feedback have been in tune with some specialists who’ve instructed that the disruption within the H-1B visa coverage might function a possibility for India — because it might, in idea, stanch the mind drain that the nation has lengthy suffered from.
GTRI’s Srivastava mentioned that US corporations which have till now relied on immigrant visas just like the H-1B may now discover extra native hiring or offshore some jobs. “The $100,000 H-1B price makes onsite deployment prohibitively costly, so Indian IT companies will double down on offshore and distant supply,” he mentioned.
“US postings shall be reserved just for mission-critical roles, whereas the majority of hiring and mission execution shifts to India and different offshore hubs,” he instructed Al Jazeera. “For US purchasers, this implies increased dependence on offshore groups — elevating acquainted considerations about information safety, compliance, and time-zone coordination — at the same time as prices climb.”
Srivastava famous that India’s tech sector can soak up some returning H-1B staff, in the event that they select to return.
However that gained’t be simple. He mentioned that although hiring in India’s IT and companies sector has been rising year-on-year, the gaps are actual, starting from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and information science. And US-trained returnees would count on salaries properly above Indian benchmarks.
And in actuality, Kaushik mentioned, many H-1B aspirants are taking a look at totally different international locations as alternate options to the US — not India.
Ansh, the senior engineer at Meta, agreed. “Within the US, we function on the slicing fringe of expertise,” whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was nonetheless geared in the direction of delivering fast companies.
“The Indian ecosystem is just not on the tempo the place you innovate the following massive factor on the planet,” he mentioned. “It’s, in reality, removed from there.”