The H-1B visa has always been more than a line on a passport or a stamp in a file. It is, for many Indians, a talisman of mobility, a certificate of global belonging.

It is the ladder across an ocean that allows a young engineer, a data scientist, a systems analyst to recast a life. For American firms it is an artery to foreign talent, for universities it is the dangling promise that study can lead to work, and for families it is a fragile thread that keeps two households alive across time zones.

Now, that thread has been pulled taut again, almost to breaking.

Washington’s Sudden Surgery

The new measures announced in Washington this September have changed the contours of the H-1B debate. The White House chose the instrument of executive proclamation, not the slower lanes of legislative tinkering, and set in motion reforms that strike at the foundation of how the visa operates.

A sharp hike in fees for new entries, amounts so steep they might as well be deterrents, was accompanied by a shift away from the lottery system toward a wage-weighted mechanism, higher minimum wage thresholds, and hints of restrictions on programmes like Optional Practical Training. This is not routine immigration housekeeping; it is structural surgery performed in full public view.

Ripples in New Delhi

The reverberations travelled quickly. In New Delhi, the Ministry of External Affairs voiced ‘deep concern,’ using the careful vocabulary of diplomacy but underlining the humanitarian consequences for families and the economic hit to firms.

Trade bodies of the technology sector warned that decades of contracts and delivery models could unravel overnight. The larger Indian IT houses, with war chests deep enough to cushion the blow, said little beyond ritual disappointment; the smaller firms and start-ups, many of which survive on thin project margins, described the changes in starker terms: existential.

An Old Argument, A New Stage

For Washington, the arguments are old but freshly packaged. Critics of the programme have long claimed that the H-1B depresses wages for entry-level American workers, that it is prone to misuse by labour contractors who flood the lottery........

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