New Delhi, India – Megna Gupta* had planned it all – Master’s degree up to the age of 23, working in India for several years, and eventually moved to the US when he turned 30 to settle there.
There, she recorded countless hours at Tata Consultant Services Hyderabad Office (TCS), India’s largest IT company and driving the country’s emergence as the sector’s global outsourcing powerhouse. She was waiting to reach a promotion that meant a stint on the West Coast of California.
Gupta is now 29 years old and her dreams are in tatters after President Donald Trump’s administration defeated the H-1B visa program, which tech companies have used for over 30 years to bring skilled workers to the United States.
Trump’s decision to raise visa fees from around $2,000 to $100,000 in many cases, has placed dramatic new costs on businesses sponsoring these applications. The base salary that H-1B Visa employees are due to be paid is $60,000. However, employers’ costs rise to at least $160,000, and in many cases businesses may find American workers with similar skills for low wages.
This is the rationale for the Trump administration as it pushes American businesses to hire local talent amid a bigger anti-immigration policy. But this is a blow as thousands of young people around the world are still fascinated by American dreams. And despite an economy that is growing faster than most other great powers, India, the world’s most populous country, is bleeding skilled young people into developing countries.
For years, the Indian IT companies themselves sponsored the most H-1B visas for all companies, taking Indian employees to the US, and then contractually outsourced their expertise to other businesses. This has been changed. In 2014, seven of the 10 companies that received most H-1B visas were launched in Indians or India. In 2024, that number fell to four.
And in the first six months of 2025, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company with the top 10 H-1B visa recipient on the list controlled by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.
However, what has not changed so far was the demographics of workers even the above mentioned US companies employed on H-1B visas. Over 70% of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian citizens in 2024, from the technology sector to medicine. The Chinese people were in the far two seconds, with less than 12%.
Now, thousands of people across India fear this road to America is closed.
“I was heartbroken,” Gupta told Al Jazeera about Trump’s fee hike.
“For my whole life I had planned this. Everything went around this goal to move to the US,” said Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 people in Uttarakhand, north India.
“The so-called “American Dream” now looks like a cruel joke. ”
“In the hole”
The Gupta crisis reflects the broader contradictions that define India today. On the one hand, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention, the country is the fastest growing major economy in the world.
Today in India, after passing through Japan earlier this year, boasts the world’s fourth largest gross domestic product (GDP), only after the US, China and Germany. However, the creation of new jobs in the country is far behind the number of young people entering the workforce each year, widening the employment gap. India’s biggest cities are public infrastructure, stupid roads, traffic roars and increasing revenue inequality.
The outcome: Millions like Gupta are aiming to live in the West, usually choosing career options in sectors such as engineering and medicine, entering intense seats at top colleges and then moving on. Over the past five years, India has seen a dramatic rise in the outflow of skilled professionals, particularly in the STEM field, which migrates to countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
According to Indian government data, these figures increased from 94,145 Indians in 2020 to 348,629 by 2024. This is an increase of 270%.
Trump’s new visa system has enabled them to effectively close these skilled workers pipelines to the United States. The fee hike has been behind a series of tensions in sour US-India relations over the last few months. New Delhi is currently facing sudden 50% tariffs on exports to the US. Half of that was because they purchased Russian crude oil.
Ajay Srivastava, former India’s trade chief and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the most difficult hit sector after the new visa policy will “help support mid-level IT service jobs, software developers, project managers and findance.”
For many of these positions, the new $100,000 fee exceeds the annual salary of entry-level employees, making sponsorships uneconomical, particularly for small businesses and startups. “The cost of hiring foreign workers is now significantly outweighing local employment,” he said, adding that this will change employment calculations for US companies.
“American companies scout more domestic talent, book the H-1B only in the most challenging professional roles, pushing routine work to offshore offshore or other hubs,” Srivastava said.
“The market is already priced at this pivot,” he said, citing the collapse of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “we will be responsible for investors cutting jobs in the US.”
Indian STEM alumni and students said “we must completely rethink our career plans in the US.”
To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Indian Student Association, a body with 120 universities, said that “creating panic and pain between H-1B Visa holders and other immigrant visa holders” of the Trump administration.
“To remind them that they do not belong,” Kausik told Al Jazeera. “And the possibility of staying in the United States at any time, at any whim, can become extremely difficult and unbearably impossible.”
The announcement came shortly after the start of a new academic session. This has been launched by many international students, including India, which sends the largest foreign students to the US.
Typically, the majority of such students return to the United States for post-graduation work. An analysis of a national survey of university graduates suggests that 41% of international students who graduated from 2012 to 2020 were still in the United States in 2021.
However, Kaushik said he received over 80 queries on the hotline for students worried about what the future holds.
“They already know they’re in the hole,” he says, referring to tuition and other fees that will hit the tens of thousands of dollars they invested in US education, with an increasingly unclear job outlook.
Today’s US landscape represents “low opportunities, tight competition and reduced returns to US education,” according to GTRI’s Srivastava.
Nasscom, India’s pinnacle IT trade organisation, says the rapid development of policies “can cause families to be disrupted” and that continuity of ongoing land projects for the national technology services company could allow for the country’s ongoing terrestrial projects.
The new policy added that it could have a “ripple effect” on the US innovation ecosystem and the global job market.
“They don’t care about people at all.”
Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which is India’s most renowned chain of engineering faculties, and soon got a job on Facebook.
He currently lives with his wife in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, USA, and drives a BMW sedan. Anshu and his wife are both in the US on H-1B visas.
News from the White House last Saturday rattled him.
He found a flight for a friend that night – the Indians were on an H-1B visa Indians abroad, one in London and the other in Bengaluru, India, to see if they could return to the US before the new rules began on Sunday.
Since then, the Trump administration has made clear that new fees will not apply to existing H-1B visas or renewals. For now, ANSH’s job and status in the US is safe.
But this is a bit more relief, he said.
“In the last 11 years I have never felt like returning to India,” Anshu told Al Jazeera. “But this kind of instability causes people to change their lives. And now we’re here and wondering if we should return to India?”
He and his wife have no children, Ansh said that while the move to India is a dramatic burst of their lives and plans, it is at least something they can take into account. But what about coworkers and friends with H-1B visas who have children?
“The way this was done by the US government shows that they don’t care about people at all,” he said. “These types of decisions are… like a brain wave strike and it’s just been implemented.”
Ansch believes the US also believes it is losing out from the new visa policy. “The contributions of immigration are deeply littered through the DNA of American success,” he said.
“When you lose talent, innovation doesn’t happen,” he said. “It will have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. The impact will reach everyone in one way or another.”
India’s struggle
After being announced by the White House on Saturday, PK Mishra, Prime Minister Modi’s chief secretary, said the government is encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.
Mishra’s comments were in harmony with some experts who suggested that the disruption in the H-1B visa policy could serve as an opportunity for India.
GTRI’s Srivastava said US companies that previously relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B may now explore more local employment and some jobs. “The $100,000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployments prohibitively expensive, so Indian IT companies will double offshore and remote delivery,” he said.
“US posts are reserved only for mission-critical roles, but the majority of employment and project execution will be moved to India and other offshore hubs,” he told Al Jazeera. “For US clients, this means they are more dependent on offshore teams. Even as costs rise, they raise familiar concerns about data security, compliance and time-of-day adjustments.”
Srivastava pointed out that if India’s tech sector chooses to return, it can absorb the returned H-1B workers.
But that’s not easy. He said that despite the growing year-over-year employment in India’s IT and Services sector, the challenges are realistic, and the gaps are real, from job immersion to new openings focused on AI, cloud and data science. And US-trained returnees will expect salaries that are far above the Indian benchmark.
And in reality, Kaushik says many H-1B applicants see different countries as alternatives to the US, not India.
Anshu, a senior engineer at Meta, agreed. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology,” but the Indian technology ecosystem still aimed to provide immediate service.
“The Indian ecosystem is not at a pace to innovate the next big thing in the world,” he said. “In fact, it’s far from there.”
