H-1B visa shake-up crushes the American dream for Indian students

The new $100,000 fee for the H-1B skilled immigrant work visa has young tech talent in India thinking twice about going to the United States.

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.