New Delhi: Dozens of leading American companies, including Microsoft and Pepsico, have been run by leaders who found their footing in the US thanks to the H-1B visa. Now, US President Donald Trump has announced a USD 100,000 fee on each fresh application, leaving immigrant communities distressed and confused, writes Alex Travelli in the New York Times.
The article also looks at what this spells for the already fragile India-US relationship. As of 2024, over 3 lakh Indians were working in the US on H-1B visas.
“These visas give Indians substantial exposure to the U.S., its professional culture and its soft power,” Alexander Slater, managing director at Capstone, a global forecasting and business strategy firm in Washington, has been quoted as saying.
“If the outcome of the policy change is that fewer Indians are working with Americans, it will weaken a significant bond between the two countries. And for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, already dazed by Mr. Trump’s trade war, it’s another headache-inducing twist in the topsy-turvy relationship with the United States,” writes Travelli.
As American tech companies have grown into globe-spanning behemoths, India has been producing far more engineers and other scientific specialists, trained in English, than any other country, he writes.
“A generation of Indians went to the United States to enrich themselves in ways they could not at home, and American companies were enriched in ways they could not have achieved without them,” Travelli says.
The Financial Times’ Chris Kay, Andres Schipani and Krishn Kaushik also look at the fallout of Trump’s H-1B visa decision, and the crash of Indians’ American dream.
“This is going to crash the number of foreign students applying to the US,” a recruiter at a West Coast technology company told the FT. “They’re going to be saddled with astronomical student loans and no way to work in the US.”
“The H-1B programme has produced some of America’s most prominent corporate leaders, including Sundar Pichai at Google owner Alphabet and Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and a former H-1B holder, has argued that US tech dominance rests on the ability to attract global talent through such schemes,” says the report.
“But Trump and his supporters have attacked the visa programme, accusing Indian and US tech companies of abusing it to import cheaper labour at the expense of American workers.”
A bureaucratic tapestry makes it difficult for foreign businesses to survive in India. They might be lured in by the promise of a “vast workforce and its potential as a consumer market”, but even making inroads is difficult, reports Shan Li in the Wall Street Journal.
“As India faces fresh economic pressure from U.S. tariffs of 50%, some say it is more pressing than ever for it to fix roadblocks that hamper its economic potential,” says the report.
“In India, it takes an average of 4.3 years to fully close a factory, according to government data cited in the paper Chatterjee co-wrote. That is compared with one year in Singapore, 15 months in Germany and one to two years in the U.K.”
The WSJ focuses largely on the story of General Motors, which faced roadblocks after roadblocks when attempting to wrap up its India operations, also owing to labour disputes and cases filed by unions.
“GM’s exit from the Indian market was part of a strategic decision at that time to scale back money-losing international operations to invest in electric vehicles, analysts said. The company had lost over $1 billion over two decades of operating in the country, according to legal filings,” says the report.
“The sale of one plant, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, went off relatively smoothly in 2017 because the company offered to transfer workers to its other factory in Pune, in neighboring Maharashtra state, according to former executives.”
However, “the process of unloading the second plant dragged on for four years,” says the report.
The AI boom in India “causes anxiety”. There are fears of job losses and of foreign domination. This is as it has emerged as the second largest market for Open AI and Anthropic, notes The Economist.
“Yet India stands to gain far more by embracing AI than it will lose,” The Economist argues. “Many benefits of being open to global tech firms are already plain. The country’s payments network, which handles around 700m transactions a day, is piloting the use of AI to spot fraud in real time. Deeper transformations may emerge. AI assistants might help mitigate India’s chronic shortages of teachers and doctors.”
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
Also Read: Eye on India-US ties: Why their ‘demolition’ reflects Trump’s ‘failure to take China seriously’
Indians working in USA in H1B visa should come back to India en masse and continue working from India for the same tech companies. They will save a lot if they get the same salary and it will benefit Indian businesses like cabs, restaurants, etc.