Trump's H-1B visa fee knocks down a bridge between India and 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.

- Alex Travelli

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.

President Donald Trump on Friday 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 on 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 US employer but Indians are in a league of their own. They won 71 per cent 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 US 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.