Silicon Valley Confusion Over H-1B Visa Spurs Tech Plunge in India

Silicon Valley executives spent the weekend trying to determine if tens of thousands of their staff would be impacted by the White House’s sudden decision to levy a $100,000 fee on skilled foreign worker visas, which previously cost $2,000 to $5,000.

Such was the confusion that several H-1B holders got off an India-bound Emirates flight from San Francisco before takeoff on Friday. On Monday, it was the tech industry across the Pacific, in the country where that plane was headed, that had the most pressure to contend with.

The Cost of Doing Hiring

While the White House announced its plan for the $100,000 fee on Friday with a hasty Sunday implementation, it didn’t clarify until Saturday that the new fee won’t apply to existing visas. By that point, firms including Amazon, Google and Microsoft had advised foreign national employees to remain in the US or return immediately. Ultimately, the new fee will apply to H-1Bs when they are first granted, and not to existing visas or any future renewals.

H-1B visas let companies sponsor skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations that require educational or professional experience, making them particularly popular in tech: Some 60% of H-1B workers since 2012 were sponsored for computer-related work, according to Pew. With 10,000 approved beneficiaries in the 2025 fiscal year, e-commerce giant Amazon is the number one H-1B employer, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Under the new fee regime, bringing in that many employees for the first time would cost $1 billion. Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and Deloitte also feature in the top 10 H-1B sponsors, now incentivized to reconsider the heftier upfront costs of hiring abroad. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings tweeted it is a “great solution” that will ensure the program is “used just for very high-value jobs,” alluding to critics who say the program is frequently used to bring in cheaper foreign labor. While that long-term consideration will play out stateside in the years to come, another country is facing more immediate consequences:

• According to US government figures, roughly 71% of H-1B beneficiaries last year were from India, a country where the five largest IT firms make 55% of their revenue from the US. India’s large IT consulting sector brings in thousands of workers to perform duties in the US and, after Amazon, the second largest H-1B employer is Mumbai-headquartered IT giant Tata Consultancy Services.
• Mumbai-listed shares in Tata and Infosys, another consultancy that makes significant use of the H-1B program, fell 3% and 2.5%, respectively, on Monday. The Nifty IT Index, which tracks the broader Indian tech sector, fell 3%.

Doctor Loophole: Thousands of hospitals and medical research centers use the H-1B program to sponsor physicians and other medical professionals to address healthcare worker shortages. The American Medical Association raised an alarm Monday, stating the new H-1B fee “risks shutting off the pipeline of highly trained physicians, especially in rural and underserved communities.” The White House later suggested physicians and medical residents could be eligible for exemptions “in the national interest.”