The great American dream may now be too expensive to achieve

New Delhi, Sep 20 (IANS) United States President Donald Trump hiking H-1B non-immigrant visa fees to a steep USD 100,000 would affect thousands of Indian students with the American dream.

It will sharply reduce low‑and mid‑paid H‑1B hiring, concentrate approvals on senior and high‑value roles, and force employers and employees to shift to alternative pathways, or restructure staffing models.

Immediate effects are already visible in travel advisories and market reactions; medium‑term effects will reshape sourcing strategies in tech, professional services, and higher education.

The hike would mainly affect those aspiring for a middle- or entry-level jobs, where the early career median wage ranges between USD 65,000-80,000 per annum and that for mid-career about USD 100,000-122,000 per annum.

These figures are from the same document quoted in the President’s ‘Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers’ order.

For those at high levels, up to the top-of-the-stair position, the employer may not be inconvenienced in paying the sum -- perhaps sharing a part of it with the employee.

But a new Satya Nadella or another Sundar Pichai needs to rise from the ranks. The entry route may now lie almost sealed.

Indian nationals constitute the single largest nationality with seven in ten approvals, and China is a distant second. Other countries make up much smaller shares.

Reports place the working population on H‑1B status in the US at roughly 440-446 thousand individuals, with one such summary citing approximately 442,000 H‑1B holders for FY 2025.

This category is dominated by computer‑related and information‑technology occupations, software engineers, data scientists, systems analysts, artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers, among others.

Large tech firms and Indian services firms are major sponsors.

However, the uber-rich can avail the Gold Card visa programme, “facilitating expedited immigration for aliens who make significant financial gifts to the United States,” according to an Executive Order signed by the President on September 19.

The programme facilitates expedited immigrant visas for aliens “donating” USD 1 million individually or USD 2 million if paid for by a corporation or similar entity on behalf of an individual, added the order.

Proclaimed on the same day, the ‘Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers’ order has quoted a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to prove its point.

According to it, “among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 6.1 per cent and 7.5 per cent, respectively -- more than double the unemployment rates of recent biology and art history graduates.”

The Reserve Bank report also shows that unemployment rates are higher in anthropology (9.4 per cent) and physics (7.8 per cent), with computer engineering making it to the third spot.

In this list, computer engineering featured as the seventh highest area in unemployment.

At the same time, computer science and computer engineering are witnessing underemployment rates of 16.5 and 17 per cent, respectively, as per the published data.

The US labour market in these two specialised fields is undergoing a rapid structural change driven by generative AI adoption and hiring recalibration, mass layoffs. It will now add geographic rebalancing to the list.

Meanwhile, information systems and management, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York document, is witnessing a 5.6 per cent unemployment rate, with a 28.5 per cent underemployment rate.

Apart from hunting for the right people offshore, American firms followed a trend of reducing manufacturing and frontline support roles by outsourcing such jobs to companies abroad -- mostly in Asia.

Increasing the demand for higher‑value functions like design, management and advanced manufacturing engineering domestically, it lowered production and service costs, leading to lower consumer prices and higher corporate profitability.

However, all these did come at the cost of domestic employment in affected sectors.

--IANS

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