NEW DELHI — In India, some of the biggest jobs in tech come to you.
Graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT), one of the country’s most prestigious universities, are recruited directly by Indian companies as well as American firms looking to lock down some of the world’s top talent in fields that will dominate the future, such as artificial intelligence and robotics.
Many of them also continue their studies in the United States, where India overtook China last year as the biggest source of foreign students. But policy decisions and other moves by the Trump administration, including the recently announced $100,000 fee for the H-1B skilled immigrant work visa, now have those graduates thinking twice about going to America.
“About 20 students are graduating from my department, and nearly 10 to 15 have a postdoctoral offer from the U.S.,” said Ajaykumar Udayraj Yadav, a materials science and engineering doctoral candidate working on energy storage systems, who is among the student volunteers at the Office of Career Services at IIT’s New Delhi campus.
“But the way they’re seeing the situation develop in the U.S., these students are unwilling to take them up,” he said.
While offers to work directly in the U.S. are few and far between, more common is relocation via the H-1B program after working in Indian offices for a few years. Out of the 400,000 H-1B visas approved in the 2024 financial year, 71% of the grantees were born in India, according to the Department of Homeland Security. China was a distant second at less than 12%.
Among the top H-1B employers are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, as well as consulting firms such as Accenture and Deloitte, according to the DHS data. U.S. tech leaders who once held H-1B visas include Satya Nadella, the chairman and chief executive of Microsoft; Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and its parent company, Alphabet; and Elon Musk.
It was a tried and tested formula that held up for decades, enabling what was the Indian dream.
But on Sept. 19, a surprise proclamation from President Donald Trump increased the fee for new H-1B visa applications to $100,000, up from $2,000 to $5,000 per application.
The increase, on top of a series of deportations and immigration arrests affecting Indians and other foreign nationals, has stung young science and tech talent in India and spurred other countries to try to scoop them up instead.
“Our migration policy works a bit like a German car. It is reliable, it is modern, it is predictable,” Philipp Ackermann, the German ambassador to India, said in a video posted on X four days after Trump’s H-1B announcement. “We do not change our rules fundamentally overnight. Highly skilled Indians are welcome in Germany.”
The same day, British Finance Minister Rachel Reeves said the United Kingdom would ease routes to bring high-skilled workers into the country. China, meanwhile, launched its own special visa for foreign tech talent on Wednesday.
“China welcomes outstanding talent from all industries and sectors around the globe to come to China, take root in China, and work together to advance human society,” foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters in Beijing last month.
Yadav, the doctoral candidate, said the trend among Indian students is shifting away from the U.S. and toward European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, which have high English fluency and a quicker and more reliable path to citizenship.
“The dream would be to get a great job in India, but if someone mentions going abroad, I personally keep Europe as a better option compared to the U.S.,” he said, adding that this was also an opportunity for India to find ways to retain its talent.
Asian destinations such as South Korea, home to Samsung and other tech giants, have also risen in popularity.
Priyanshu Agrawal, a 20-year-old computer science senior at IIT, said he already has a job offer from a South Korean company and has no plans on going to the U.S.
“If there are restrictions like these, then people wonder why go to a country that isn’t so welcoming,” he said. “You stop seeing the advantage of going there.”
Trump’s proclamation said the H1-B program had been “deliberately exploited” to replace American workers with “lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” The announcement was another setback to U.S.-India relations, which have sharply deteriorated after Trump slapped damaging tariffs on Indian imports, complained about Apple manufacturing iPhones in India and made overtures to Indian archrival Pakistan.
“This will create another pressure point in U.S.-India relations,” said Gil Guerra, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a Washington-based think tank. “One potential consequence of this is another uptick in irregular Indian migration as legal pathways become even harder to pursue.”
India’s foreign ministry said the H-1B fee increase, which applies only to new visa applicants, “is likely to have humanitarian consequences by way of the disruption caused for families.”
Analysts say it may hurt the U.S. more.
“This decision will cause U.S. businesses to offshore and drive innovation and entrepreneurship outside of the United States,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “The proclamation shows utter contempt for some of the most productive, innovative, and law-abiding people in American history.”
In addition to allowing American companies to hire directly from India, the H-1B program also helps some of the more than 330,000 Indians studying in the U.S. to stay in the country after they graduate.
“Universities will suffer and so will countless college towns with the drop of international student demographic,” said Sudhanshu Kaushik, executive director of the North American Association of Indian Students.
“I hope a recourse happens,” he added.
Mithil Aggarwal reported from New Delhi, and Jay Ganglani and Peter Guo from Hong Kong.
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