【By Observer News, Xiong Chaoran】 Recently, the Trump administration in the United States revised the H-1B visa policy, increasing the fees that applicants must pay to $100,000. This bold move aimed at tightening immigration policies has had the most severe impact on Indian tech talent. With a 50% high tariff before and high H-1B visa fees after, U.S.-India relations have been shrouded in "dark clouds."

On September 25 local time, the U.S. Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) reported that about 71% of H-1B visa holders come from India, and U.S. companies may also face trouble. According to data from the Pew Research Center, more than half of the approved visas were issued to people working in computer-related fields, which means for these companies, it's not just that Indian tech talent is becoming harder to obtain.

"Restrictions might backfire, potentially stimulating resilience."

CNBC expressed great concern, pointing out that looking at China, U.S. chip export controls did not stifle its artificial intelligence ambitions but instead pushed China's progress in this field. For example, with the use of less advanced H800 chips from NVIDIA and lower costs, third-party tests show that China's DeepSeek R1 model performs better than OpenAI's GPT-4o model.

Thus, the report came to this view—that if the U.S. starts closing its doors to Indian talent, will India's tech ecosystem take a similar path? It is possible.

On September 19, 2025, local time, U.S. President Trump signed an executive order in Washington D.C., significantly reforming the H-1B visa program. Oriental IC

CNBC said that for decades, the "American dream" of Indian tech talent not only propelled the rise of Silicon Valley but also sparked a parallel growth boom in India. As third-party IT service companies continued to expand, Indian tech talent also migrated overseas in large numbers.

The outsourcing employment boom that began in the late 1990s gradually evolved into software service companies and eventually developed into code research and development centers. Although the new "barriers" set by Washington may bring impacts, this might only return India's technology development journey to the original stage—moving from outsourcing to internalization.

"This policy will have an effect of incentivizing offshore economic activities," said Professor Steven Durlauf from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. High H-1B visa fees will hinder U.S. companies from employing the most talented people in the global workforce.

Aditya Mehta, a business expert at audit firm RSM US, stated that for India, the new H-1B fee system is expected to increase attention on so-called "Global Capability Centers" (GCC), especially among mid-sized U.S. companies facing higher costs and uncertainties. Mehta specifically helps U.S. companies establish such centers.

GCCs are branches of multinational companies established abroad to perform complex tasks such as design and research. Currently, these GCCs have evolved from low-cost offshore offices into high-value innovation centers supporting operations, finance, and R&D. India currently has more than half of the world's GCCs.

CNBC pointed out that the connection between U.S. companies and Indian tech talent has exceeded four decades. From the initial outsourcing of technical support services to Indian third-party companies, this system has become more tightly integrated today. Now, governments around the world are seizing the opportunity to attract technical talents to develop in their countries.

"India currently has over 1,600 operating GCCs, employing more than 1.7 million people," Rajat Dhawan, managing partner of McKinsey India, said earlier during an interview with CNBC.

Vikram Ahuja, co-founder of U.S. consulting company ANSR, believes that less than 30% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list have GCCs in India, so there is still room for expansion. Ahuja said his company predicts that the number of such GCCs will grow by 60% within the next two to three years.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, over half of the first-time H-1B visa applicants in fiscal year 2024 came from India, with about 80,000 seeking opportunities to go to the U.S.

Indian brokerage institution Kotak Institutional Equities pointed out that in recent years, IT and major tech companies have been reducing their reliance on H-1B visas. After reaching a peak between 2020 and 2022, the number of new visas approved for most tech giants in the U.S. and Indian IT companies began to decline.

Experts said these figures reflect the efforts of Indian IT companies to hire local talent, as well as the trend of large U.S. tech companies establishing GCCs in places with concentrated talent pools.

On September 19 local time, U.S. President Trump signed a statement raising the fees that companies pay for H-1B visa applicants to $100,000, while over 70% of H-1B visa holders come from India.

Bloomberg said that this move by the U.S. will have a disproportionate impact on Indians, as well as hit India's $280 billion tech services industry, threaten the business outsourcing model, and could put thousands of jobs at risk. At the same time, it casts another shadow over U.S.-India relations and adds uncertainty to bilateral trade negotiations.

According to Reuters, the U.S. government announced a proposal on September 23 local time to revise the H-1B visa selection process, prioritizing workers with higher skills and higher salaries.

According to the report, if the proposal is finalized, the new process will give higher weight to applications where employers offer higher salaries to applicants when the annual visa application volume exceeds the statutory limit of 85,000.

This article is an exclusive article from Observer News, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7555341799976403483/

Statement: The article represents the views of the author. Welcome to express your opinion by clicking on the [Up/Down] buttons below.