Trump’s $100K visa upends lives: ‘My dreams shattered’

A generation of students in India pinned hopes and family savings on careers that once soared on H-1B visas allowing work in the United States, write Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj from New Delhi

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Ruthvitch Sharma, left, working in a mechanical engineering lab at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, said his ambition is 'to work with the greatest talents in the world'.

Sai Jagruthi, a 17-year-old engineering student at a giant technical university in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, remembers exactly where she was when she heard the news.

She had just finished a dinner of okra and rice in the student cafeteria, she said, when her father called to tell her about a proclamation US President Donald Trump had made from the White House on Sept 19. Every H-1B visa, a work permit that has brought millions of Indians to the United States since the 1990s, would now come with a $100,000 (3.22 million baht) fee. “My dreams were shattered,’ she said.

She recalled her father saying, “It was the best option, and we are going to lose it” For Ms Jagruthi, excelling at her studies was a family affair. Her father, a widower who works at a bank, “wants a better life for their daughters than his own. Going to the US was a ticket to that,” she said.

The new rules threaten to stop up a pipeline for a fast-growing class of young dreamers. Indians with middle-class backgrounds, especially in the country’s relatively prosperous south, have invested deeply in technical education as a way to get ahead — a way that often went through the United States.

Trump is reordering US immigration policy, vowing to make it increasingly difficult for many foreigners to enter and remain in the country. The order that struck Ms Jagruthi so directly concerned a category of visa that Indians dominated: 72% of the 400,000 H-1Bs granted last year went to applicants from India.