 "Head-on | From brain drain to brain gain: India’s H-1B visa opportunity")
When the dust settles around the $1,00,000 H-1B fee imposed by US President Donald Trump, the clear long-term winner will be India. The long-term loser? America. President Trump’s executive order has shot US innovation in the foot and given India’s innovation industry a shot in the arm.
As Vivek Wadhwa, a respected tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, wrote in a leading daily: “For India this is a historic opening. For decades, its brightest minds left because the US was the only place they could do cutting-edge work, and the H-1B visa was their bridge. The US has a shortage of high-end skills in fields such as artificial intelligence, deep science, hard-core engineering, computing and biotechnology. These are not roles that can be filled by retraining displaced factory workers.
“India should hang a sign on Route 101 in Silicon Valley saying: If America does not want you, India does. The country now offers far more than elite schools. It has a thriving digital economy, a proven track record of scaling technologies like UPI to hundreds of millions, world-class hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturing at global scale, and a startup ecosystem with ambition and capital. Add to this a young workforce, lower costs, and a government eager to back science and entrepreneurship and the advantages are obvious. The outcome will be a weaker United States and a stronger India.”
The new visa fee will obviously face an immediate challenge in a US court. President Trump passed the H-1B executive order under Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Does Trump have the authority to raise H-1B visa fees whose structure has been mandated by Congress? Cyrus D Mehta, an immigration lawyer, said Trump’s executive order on H-1B visa fees is unlawful: “The proclamation banning H-1B workers is so blatantly unlawful that it rewrites parts of the INA.”
Other attorneys point out that Section 212(f) of the INA allows “suspending entry but does not authorise a $1,00,000 charge by executive proclamation alone. This fee is unlawful on its face.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsLike all other Trump executive orders — including the imposition of arbitrary tariffs up to 50 per cent on exports to the US — the H-1B visa order too will end up in the US Supreme Court.
But whether the SC upholds or dismisses the executive order, it has already served Trump’s purpose. His MAGA base, which is deeply anti-immigration, has lapped up the move though many MAGA hardliners argue that the $1,00,000 fee should be levied annually and not merely be a one-time charge. They back Trump when he says Indian and Chinese tech workers on H-1B visas are depriving Americans of jobs.
Beset by rising unemployment, especially among young Americans, Trump hopes to pass the blame for rising inflation and joblessness to foreign workers rather than to his own trade policies.
Trump’s other objective is to use the H-1B visa fee as leverage in trade negotiations with India and China, the only two major economies that have defied Trump on buying Russian oil. Virtually all H-1B visas go to Indian and Chinese tech workers.
India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal flew to the US this week to restart halted trade negotiations with his US counterparts. India has stood firm on guarding its strategic autonomy. It not only continues to buy Russian oil but will soon take delivery of two more Russian-made S-400 air defence platforms for which it has already paid Moscow. The three S-400s India currently deploys were a gamechanger in Operation Sindoor. Pakistan’s Chinese and Turkish drones and missiles failed to hit a single significant target on Indian soil.
The $1,00,000 H-1B visa fee meanwhile provides India an opportunity to reverse its decades-long tech drain and convert it into a brain gain. As India’s former G20 sherpa and former vice-chairman of Niti Aayog Amitabh Kant posted on X: “By slamming the door on global talent, America pushes the next wave of labs, patents, innovation and startups to Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon. India’s finest doctors, engineers, scientists and innovators have an opportunity to contribute to India’s growth and progress towards #Viksit Bharat. America’s loss will be India’s gain.”
Kant points out that the US doesn’t have the tech talent in its workforce to do cutting-edge innovation: “There is a massive shortage of high-end skills in computing, engineering and deep science in the US. These skills can’t be created overnight. US companies were therefore attracting the best and brightest talent from across the world. This defined the innovative spirit of the US.”
Indian IT software companies have been cutting their H-1B visas applications for a number of years. Apart from TCS (which has over 5,000 workers on H-1B visas), other Indian IT firms have a negligible share of their workforce at US onshore sites.
India has been bleeding talent to the US for over 30 years. The reverse flow could not have been better timed. Indian startups headquartered in the US or Singapore are already flipping their headquarters back to India. Flipkart, owned by Walmart, is a major example.
Indian tech workers traditionally sought jobs abroad under the H-1B visa programme because it is a route to a green card and eventual citizenship. But with business opportunities in India growing rapidly, and countries like the US, Australia and Britain becoming more openly racist, young techies increasingly want to be part of the India growth story rather than being second-class citizens in the First World whose economies ironically are increasingly looking Third World.
The West is in terminal decline. The violent anti-immigration protests by nearly 1,50,000 English racists in the “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London on September 13, the toxic “March for Australia” rallies across several Australian cities on August 31, and the racist outpourings by a crowd of over 2,00,000 at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona on September 21 are not signs of a thriving civilisation. They are signs of a decaying Western civilisation.
The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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