H-1B shock: India must look beyond America

Washington may keep changing the rules; India must make sure its economic prospects are not held hostage to them

The US Department of Homeland Security has proposed a fresh $103,265 fee — nearly `99 lakh, rounded off to "a crore" — on every H-1B petition subject to the annual cap. This is formal rulemaking, not an overnight proclamation: it follows the collapse of the $100,000 entry fee Donald Trump imposed last September, which a federal court declared an unlawful tax in June and which the First Circuit Court of Appeals refused to revive on July 24 — precisely why Washington is now trying the sturdier route of regulation. Unlike the original order, it would also strike petitions from workers already inside the US — students on F-1 OPT converting to H-1B, among others — a group the first round had spared.

Nothing is final yet: DHS has opened a 30-day comment window. But the direction is unmistakable, and it points at India. Indian nationals take home roughly seven in ten H-1B approvals every year, so the arithmetic lands hardest here. If the older fee is eventually revived on appeal, alongside this new one, an employer could face upwards of $200,000 per hire before legal and relocation costs. For India’s $315-billion IT services industry, the direct exposure is narrower than the headlines suggest — Nasscom notes large Indian firms have spent five years cutting H-1B dependence through local US hiring — but onsite deployments, deputation-heavy delivery models and thousands of individual careers still sit in the fee’s path.

The right response isn’t outrage, which changes nothing in Washington, but accelerating a shift already under way. India’s Global Capability Centres — over 2,100 of them, employing more than two million people — are proof that high-value technology work no longer needs an American zip code to serve American companies. Every fee hike that raises the cost of onsite deployment is, perversely, an incentive to shift that work to Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad instead. New Delhi has shown this can work: trade diplomacy already talked US tariffs on Indian goods down from 50 per cent to 18 per cent in February. The broader Bilateral Trade Agreement talks that followed remain open — the right table for a rules-based mobility chapter, rather than leaving skilled migration hostage to proclamations that courts can strike down and Washington can reissue within the same year. India is also not fighting alone: twenty US states, the Chamber of Commerce and healthcare-sector plaintiffs are already contesting the fee in court, their interests aligned with India’s for now.

The larger lesson concerns Trump’s method, not only this measure. A one-year proclamation, struck down in court, resurrected as regulation — a recognisable pattern now, one India cannot build its economic strategy around. The answer is redundancy: deeper trade and talent corridors with the Gulf, Europe, the UK and Japan, so no mood swings in Washington can unilaterally reprice Indian talent. Diplomacy should stay steady and unshowy behind closed doors. But the real response has to be structural, not seasonal — built once, not rebuilt after every proclamation.