The H-1B Fee Changed My Cousin’s Plans Overnight

My cousin had an offer letter and a lottery to win. Then a $100,000 fee arrived, and his employer started doing different maths.

What changed on September 19

On September 19, the United States announced that new H-1B petitions would carry a fee of $100,000. The H-1B is the visa most Indian engineers use to work in America, and Indians receive roughly seven out of every ten of them. Until that week, the cost to an employer of sponsoring a worker was a few thousand dollars in legal and filing fees. Overnight it became more than many of these workers earn in a year.

There was confusion for a few days about whether the fee applied to people already holding visas. It was later clarified that it applies to new petitions, not renewals. For my cousin, who had a job offer from a mid-sized software company and was waiting for the annual visa lottery, that clarification did not help. He was exactly the kind of applicant the fee was aimed at.

An employer’s calculation

His manager was honest with him. Paying $100,000 to bring one engineer to California made sense for a senior specialist, but not for a graduate hire. The company offered him the same role in its Bengaluru office instead, at an Indian salary. That is a much smaller number in dollars, though it buys a comfortable life in Bengaluru, and he would not need to win a lottery to keep it.

Multiply that decision across thousands of companies and something interesting happens. Work that used to move people to America starts moving to India instead. Global capability centres, the offices that big foreign firms run in Indian cities, were already growing quickly. A fee like this gives them another push. The jobs do not disappear. They change address.

Who wins, who loses

The obvious losers are Indian engineers who wanted to live and work in the US, and the families back home who depended on dollar remittances. Indian IT firms that send staff abroad on projects also face higher costs. The less obvious winners may be Indian cities, which keep more of their trained graduates, and the firms that hire them locally.

My cousin was disappointed for about a week. Now he is renting a flat in Whitefield and says his commute is the main thing he would change. What I took from his story is that careers are shaped by policy as much as by talent. A rule written in Washington decided which city he lives in, and it will probably do the same for thousands of students who are in school right now.