Silicon Valley is gray. Donald Trump announced a severe restriction on the conditions to obtain the H1-B visa, widely used in the technological sector to attract foreign experts, especially India.
The $ 100,000 rates will now apply for new applications. This is clearly a deterrent. The Minister of Commerce Howard Luxe clarified that he had the objective of “stop bringing people to take our job.”
Donald Trump has published since his first term of his desire to limit H-1B visas to give priority to US workers, despite the free hostility published by some of his supports such as Elon Musk. The United States approved around 400,000 H-1B visas in 2024, two thirds of which were renovations.
With these new rules, the hiring of foreign qualified workers will cost $ 14 billion a year to US companies, according to The Financial Times. The most affected company must be Amazon, which uses 14,000 employees of the H1-B visa. Microsoft, Meta, Apple or Google are also among the companies that use the most. Some of them could take legal actions, according to Financial Times, while Donald Trump already faces 135 disputes.
For Garry Tan, head of the Start-Up incubator and Combinator, this decision is “a colossal gift in each foreign technological pole.”
“If US companies cannot relocate their activities in their national territory, they could try to extend their presence abroad in countries like India,” says Bhaskar Rao, CEO of the digital communication company, with Bloomberg.
“This decision clearly aims to satisfy Trump’s voters, but it remains to be seen if companies can replace 65,000 to 85,000 Junior Executives and intermediaries involved by the H-1B Visa roof,” he adds.
These visas were created in the 1990s due to the risk of a scarcity of qualified labor. Most beneficiaries work in technology, but others are employed in education, health or industry.
Their detractors believe that these visas are used to hire foreign workers in a less than those of employees born in the United States. However, this practice, in principle, exists, recalls the New York Times, which writes that around “60 % of the positions were paid ‘well below’ local medium salary for the profession in 2019, according to the Institute of Economic Policy.”
New blow to India
Donald Trump’s screw tour is welcome as bad news in India, while 70% of the beneficiaries of these H1-B visas are Indians. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India has said that it feared that “human consequences” of this measure “due to” inflicted “interruptions to families” and “expect” US authorities to treat properly. “
For its part, the main Indian organization of the technological sector, Nasscom, fears the “continuity” of certain projects, by worrying about the speed of implementation of this measure, which “creates considerable uncertainty for companies, professionals and students around the world.”
The strategy of certain Indian companies, such as Tata Consultancy or Infosys, could be seen the other way around. This last deploy thousands of Indian engineers in US companies. The Indian IT sector weighs $ 280 billion of Bloomberg withdrawals and is an essential basis for American giants.
Donald Trump’s screw tour could still complicate relations between the two countries, while Washington has already applied very high customs tasks to New Delhi in reaction to Russian oil purchases. In India, the opposition criticizes Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not having sufficiently defended the interests of the country.
Source: BFM TV
