New Delhi, India — Meghna Gupta* had deliberate all of it – a grasp’s diploma by 23, just a few years of working in India, after which a transfer to the USA earlier than she turned 30 to finally settle there.
So, she clocked numerous hours on the Hyderabad workplace of Tata Consultancy Companies (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 may imply a stint on California’s West Coast.
Now, Gupta is 29, and her desires lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech corporations have used for greater than three a long time to convey expert employees to the US.
Trump’s resolution to extend the price for the visas from about $2,000, in lots of instances, to $100,000 has imposed dramatic new prices on firms that sponsor these functions. 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 instances, firms will doubtless discover American employees with related abilities for decrease pay.
That is the Trump administration’s rationale because it presses US firms to rent native expertise amid its bigger anti-immigration insurance policies. However for hundreds of younger folks around the globe nonetheless captivated by the American dream, this can be 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 folks to developed nations.
For years, Indian IT firms themselves sponsored probably the most H-1B visas of all corporations, utilizing them to convey Indian staff to the US after which contractually outsourcing their experience to different companies, too. This modified: In 2014, seven out of the ten firms that obtained probably the most H-1B visas had 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 an inventory 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 firms employed on H-1B visas. Greater than 70 % of all H-1B visas had been granted to Indian nationals in 2024, starting from the tech sector to drugs. Chinese language nationals had been a distant second, with lower than 12 %.
Now, hundreds throughout India worry that this pathway to the US is being slammed shut.
“It has left me heartbroken,” Gupta informed Al Jazeera of Trump’s price hike.
“All my life, I deliberate for this; every little thing circled round this aim for me to maneuver to the US,” mentioned Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a city of 10,000 folks within the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
“The so-called ‘American Dream’ appears like a merciless joke now.”
‘Within the gap’
Gupta’s disaster displays a broader contradiction that defines India immediately. 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 immediately boasts the world’s fourth-largest gross home product (GDP), behind simply the US, China and Germany, after it handed Japan earlier this 12 months. However the nation’s creation of latest jobs lags far behind the variety of younger individuals who enter its workforce yearly, widening its employment hole. India’s greatest cities are creaking beneath insufficient public infrastructure, potholed roads, site visitors snarls and rising earnings inequality.
The consequence: Hundreds of thousands like Gupta aspire to a life within the West, choosing their profession selections, normally in sectors like engineering or drugs, and dealing to get into hard-fought seats in prime faculties – 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 nations like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
As per the Indian authorities’s knowledge, these numbers rose from 94,145 Indians in 2020 to 348,629 by 2024 — a 270 % rise.
Trump’s new visa regime might now successfully shut the pipeline of these expert employees into the US. The price hike comes on the again of a collection of pressure factors in a souring US-India relationship in latest months. New Delhi can be at present dealing with a steep 50 % tariff on its exports to the US — half of that for purchasing Russian crude, which the US says is funding the Kremlin’s warfare on Ukraine.
Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian commerce officer and founding father of the International Commerce Analysis Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based suppose tank, informed Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the brand new visa coverage might be “those that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT companies jobs, software program builders, undertaking managers, and back-end assist 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 corporations 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 corporations.
“American corporations 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 informed Al Jazeera. “And at any time, at any whim, the potential for remaining in the USA can change into extremely troublesome and excruciatingly inconceivable.”
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 % of worldwide college students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 had been nonetheless within the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that determine jumps to 75 %.
However Kaushik mentioned he has obtained greater than 80 queries on their hotline for college students now fearful about what the longer term holds.
“They know that they’re already within the gap,” he mentioned, referring to the schooling and different charges operating into tens of hundreds of {dollars} that they’ve invested in a US training, with more and more unclear job prospects.
The panorama within the US immediately, Srivastava of GTRI mentioned, represents “fewer alternatives, harder competitors, and shrinking returns on US training”.
Nasscom, India’s apex IT commerce physique, has mentioned the coverage’s abrupt rollout might “doubtlessly disrupt households” and the continuity of ongoing onshore initiatives for the nation’s know-how companies corporations.
The brand new coverage, it added, might have “ripple results” on the US innovation ecosystem and international job markets, stating that for firms, “further value would require changes”.
‘They don’t take care of folks in any respect’
Ansh*, a senior software program engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Expertise (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 pals — Indians on H-1B visas who had been in a foreign country, one in London, one other in Bengaluru, India — to see if they might rush again to the US earlier than the brand new guidelines kicked in on Sunday, as main US tech corporations had beneficial to their staff.
Since then, the Trump administration has clarified that the brand new charges won’t 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 informed Al Jazeera. “However this type of instability triggers folks to make these life adjustments. And now we’re right here, questioning if one ought to return to India?”
As a result of he and his spouse wouldn’t have youngsters, Ansh mentioned {that a} transfer again to India — whereas a dramatic rupture of their lives and plans — was at the least one thing they might take into account. However what of his colleagues and pals on H-1B visas, who’ve youngsters, he requested?
“The way in which this has been completed by the US authorities exhibits that they don’t take care of folks in any respect,” he mentioned. “A majority of these selections 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 received’t occur,” he mentioned. “It will have long-term penalties for visa holders and their households. Its influence would attain everybody, somehow.”
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 had been in tune with some consultants who’ve prompt that the disruption within the H-1B visa coverage might function a chance for India — because it might, in idea, stanch the mind drain that the nation has lengthy suffered from.
GTRI’s Srivastava mentioned that US firms which have till now relied on immigrant visas just like the H-1B would possibly now discover extra native hiring or offshore some jobs. “The $100,000 H-1B price makes onsite deployment prohibitively costly, so Indian IT corporations will double down on offshore and distant supply,” he mentioned.
“US postings might be reserved just for mission-critical roles, whereas the majority of hiring and undertaking execution shifts to India and different offshore hubs,” he informed Al Jazeera. “For US purchasers, this implies increased dependence on offshore groups — elevating acquainted issues about knowledge 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 employees, in the event that they select to return.
However that received’t be straightforward. He mentioned that though 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 knowledge science. And US-trained returnees would count on salaries properly above Indian benchmarks.
And in actuality, Kaushik mentioned, many H-1B aspirants are completely different nations as options to the US — not India.
Ansh, the senior engineer at Meta, agreed. “Within the US, we function on the reducing fringe of know-how,” whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was nonetheless geared in direction of delivering rapid companies.
“The Indian ecosystem just isn’t on the tempo the place you innovate the following large factor on the planet,” he mentioned. “It’s, in reality, removed from there.”
