Former Infosys CFO and industry veteran Mohandas Pai has warned that the US decision to impose a steep $100,000 annual fee on H-1B visa applicants could dampen fresh demand from companies and accelerate offshoring in the coming months.
US President Donald Trump signed the proclamation this week, arguing that the H-1B programme, originally designed to fill high-skilled jobs, has been misused to replace American workers with lower-paid foreign labour.
Pai: ‘Rhetoric doesn’t hold water’
Pai, according to a report by PTI, dismissed the notion that Indian IT firms send cheap labour to the US. He pointed out that the average salary paid by the top 20 H-1B employers already exceeds $100,000.
“People pay more than $100,000 as salaries, they’re not cheap. If they pay their staff $100,000, they charge their clients $150,000–160,000. So all this idea of sending cheap, low-skilled people doesn’t hold water,” he said as per a PTI report.
He added that the immediate fallout is 'limited', as the proclamation impacts only new applications while existing visas remain unaffected.
Who gets hit: Not just Indian IT
Industry insiders, quoted by PTI, say Indian firms typically file 8,000–12,000 fresh H-1B applications every year. But the impact will be far wider, extending to US tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, who collectively secure thousands of approvals annually to hire “the best talent”.
A senior industry expert told PTI that the $100,000 fee is simply 'way too high' and risks slowing down innovation in the US.
H-1B leaderboard: US tech firms dominate
Data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) shows that for FY2025 (as of June 30):
Amazon topped the charts with 10,044 approvals.
TCS followed with 5,505, ahead of Microsoft (5,189), Meta (5,123), Apple (4,202), and Google (4,181).
Cognizant (2,493), JP Morgan (2,440), Walmart (2,390), and Deloitte Consulting (2,353) rounded off the top 10.
Infosys (2,004), LTIMindtree (1,807), and HCL America (1,728) also featured in the top 20 list.
What’s next: Offshore push likely
Pai underlined that over the next 6–12 months, companies are likely to pivot harder towards offshoring as onsite hiring in the US becomes prohibitively expensive.
“Now what will happen is everybody will work to increase offshoring... because it doesn’t make sense. First, you don’t get talent, second the costs are too high. They’ll increase offshore. That will happen over the next maybe six months to one year,” Pai said.
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