With US President Donald Trump signing an executive order to increase the annual fee on H-1B visas to a staggering USD 100,000 in order to check the “systemic abuse” of the worker visa programme, Indian IT and professional workers are bracing for massive visa cancellations.
Data by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has revealed that Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which was the second-highest beneficiary of the programme after Amazon with 5,505 approved H-1B visas in 2025, will be hit hard.
The highest number of workers availing H-1B visas as of June, 2025, was Amazon with 10,044 workers.
Other top beneficiaries according to the federal data include Microsoft (5189 worker visas), Meta (5123), Apple (4202), Google (4181), Deloitte (2353), Infosys (2004), Wipro (1523) and Tech Mahindra Americas (951).
In July, USCIS had said that it has received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated 65,000 H-1B visa regular cap and the 20,000 H-1B visa US advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for fiscal year 2026.
Trump’s signed a proclamation, ‘Restriction on entry of certain non-immigrant workers’, on Friday will restrict the entry of individuals as non-immigrants into the United States unless their H-1B petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of USD 100,000.
The proclamation said the restriction shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation of September 21, 2025.
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The proclamation also said that the number of foreign STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 per cent during that time.
Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 per cent in 2000 to 26.1 per cent in 2019. The key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labour has been the abuse of the H-1B visa, it said.
The proclamation further added that Information Technology (IT) firms have “prominently manipulated” the H-1B system, significantly harming American workers in computer-related fields.
In fact, the share of IT workers in the H-1B programme grew from 32 per cent in the fiscal year (FY) 2003 to an average of over 65 per cent in the last 5 fiscal years.
Additionally, some of the most prolific H-1B employers are now consistently IT outsourcing companies that provides significant savings for employers, it said, citing a study of tech workers that showed a 36 per cent discount for H-1B “entry-level” positions as compared to full-time, traditional workers.
This leads to a setback for the American staff, which is fired to avail artificially-low labour costs that have been incentivised by the programme. When companies close their IT divisions, they outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers, it said.
The proclamation also cited data that said many American tech companies have laid off their qualified and highly skilled American workers and simultaneously hired thousands of H-1B workers.
One software company was approved for over 5,000 H-1B workers in FY 2025; around the same time, it announced a series of layoffs totalling more than 15,000 employees. Another IT firm was approved for nearly 1,700 H-1B workers in FY 2025; it announced it was laying off 2,400 American workers in Oregon in July.
A third company has reduced its workforce by approximately 27,000 American workers since 2022, while being approved for over 25,000 H-1B workers since FY 2022. A fourth company reportedly eliminated 1,000 jobs in February; it was approved for over 1,100 H-1B workers for FY 2025, the proclamation said.
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