Editorial: Neither here nor there on H1B

After triggering panic among India H1B visa holders in the US by raising the application fee to USD 100,000, the White House has clarified that it will be a one-time fee for new applicants, not existing visa holders. This was an attempt to soften the blow after US Trade Secretary Howard Lutnick, speaking alongside President Donald Trump, had said, inaccurately, that the revised fee will apply per annum and retrospectively.

However, the clarification is cold comfort to Indians seeking employment in the US, for two reasons: One, even a one-time charge of USD 1,00,000 is too steep for most US employers to pay for the services of a foreign professional. Two, the fee hike is a concession to the anti-immigration feeling sweeping the US. It’s a sentiment that is impervious to economic or practical rationale. So, this is not going to be the last of the measures unleashed by the Trump administration to limit foreign workers’ access to the US employment market.

Changes to foreign-worker policies, including the H1B programme, were long anticipated in the US and should have been factored into a course-corrective approach by India. Instead, the Narendra Modi government’s response has been reactive, feeble, and fanciful. A statement put out by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the “full implications of the (H1B) measure are still being studied”; it suggested consideration of “humanitarian consequences” and played to the US need for “innovation and creativity”. That is language without a hint of steel, betraying the lack of agency or leverage.

The least MEA could have done was to acknowledge that the hefty H1B fee hike is tantamount to a tariff on services. Instead of squaring up to the challenge, apologists of the government are out and about with self-serving spin that this is, in fact, an opportunity in disguise, that vast pools of talent will now be available to the Indian tech industry to turbocharge homegrown innovation. This is nothing but whistling past the graveyard. Neither the tech services industry nor the government has ever imagined India’s tech talent as anything more than an opportunity to profit from labour arbitrage in the West.

This spin is meant to paper over the failure of initiatives such as Make in India, Startup India, and Skill India to absorb talent in ample measure. It’s a lie that India stands innovation-ready to absorb homeward-bound talent. Innovation can only be bred in an atmosphere of academic, intellectual, and scientific freedom, none of which exists in India today.

A serious duplicity lies at the core of this. The government claims to see India’s youth as a wealth of talent now, but its policy has always been to profit from exporting it. As recently as four months ago, in May 2025, the MEA collaborated in the launch of the Global Access to Talent from India (GATI) Foundation, the core idea of which is to shift the narrative from “brain drain” (loss of talent) to treating Indians working abroad as a resource or soft power, as a strategic asset. The policy hopes to leverage India’s young workforce to fill a global shortage of 45-50 million skilled and semi-skilled workers by 2030. At a time when Europe, Australia and the US are closing their immigration gateways, this points to the basic incongruity of being neither here nor there.