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Moving beyond its proposal of a $100,000 mandatory fee, the Trump administration is reportedly looking to unveil broader reforms to the H1-B visa programme.
In a note titled ‘Reforming the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Classification Program’, the US Department of Homeland Security has suggested several rule changes, including revising eligibility criteria for cap exemptions, increasing scrutiny of employers with past violations, and tightening oversight of third-party job placements, according to a report by Newsweek. The rule changes are expected to be published in December this year, as per the note.
The move comes weeks after US President Donald Trump announced that employers would have to pay a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa. These remarks sent shockwaves through members of the Indian diaspora on H-1B visas, with September 21 specified as the deadline.
H-1B visa holders and their family members currently outside the US for work or vacation scrambled to return to the country within the next 24 hours rather than risk being stranded and denied entry, as per various news reports. Tensions eased slightly only after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that the $100,000 fee was “not an annual” but a “one-time fee” that would only apply to new petitions.
However, the Trump administration’s moves to restrict and overhaul the H1-B visa programme remains closely watched as it could disrupt hiring practices in sectors dependent on foreign talent, particularly tech companies unable to bear the high visa costs. Additionally, about a third of H-1B visa holders are employed in critical sectors beyond tech like healthcare, education, religious services, and academia, according to a recent lawsuit challenging the reforms.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that his family would not have been able to immigrate from Taiwan to the US under the Trump administration’s proposed policies. “…and so the opportunity for my family and for me to be here, would not have been possible,” Huang was quoted as saying.
In this context, let’s take a look at some of the high-profile tech industry leaders who were once H-1B visa holders and where they stand on the proposed rule changes.
Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella was born and raised in India. After moving to the US in the 1990s, Nadella secured the highly coveted green card. However, he later riskily chose to relinquish his green card in order to bring his wife into the country through a H-1B visa application in 1994.
“The idea that you have to give up your green card to get an H-1B is, in retrospect, silly. And so therefore let us in fact take the reform so that it works for us, both our security but as well as our competitiveness,” Nadella was quoted as saying in a 2017 interview with CNBC.
While the MIT Manipal-graduate has welcomed an executive order reviewing H-1B for abuses under the first Trump administration, Nadella defended the H-1B visa programme in the past. He argued that the programme had provided Microsoft with high-skilled labor that helped it remain globally competitive.
Sundar Pichai was born in 1972 and grew up in Chennai. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he later attended Stanford for MS and Wharton for his MBA. Pichai joined Google in 2004 and was the driving force behind Google Chrome browser and the Chrome OS. He started the Google search tool bar when IE was the dominant browser. He became the CEO of Google in 2015, and eventually rose to become the head of parent company Alphabet as well.
“Immigration has contributed immensely to America’s economic success, making it a global leader in tech, and also Google the company it is today. Disappointed by today’s proclamation – we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all,” Pichai had written in a post on X five years ago, when President Trump temporarily suspended H1-B visas during his first term.
Aravind Srinivas is the founder and CEO of Perplexity AI. He is an IIT Madras graduate who has been making waves in Silicon Valley. Pitted in a David versus Goliath slugfest against tech titans like Microsoft and Google, the AI search startup founded by Srinivas is now valued at $20 billion.
In a recent interview, Srinivas said, “Silicon Valley has always been welcoming to outsiders. The key challenge for someone coming from abroad is trust, finding credible people who will vouch for you, invest in you and mentor you, even if they might compete with you later.” “Despite immigration hurdles, this is one of the few places in the world that is absolutely meritocratic. If users love your product and the data shows it, people support you,” he added.
Jayshree Ullal is the CEO of cloud networking company Arista Networks. She was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Delhi. At 16, Ullal moved to the US to attend college at San Francisco State University. She also has a master’s degree from Santa Clara University in California.
After graduating, Ullal worked at several prominent tech companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco. Today, the 68-year-old is one of the handful of immigrant billionaires in the US with a net worth of $6 billion
“At Arista, we believe that the best developers can come from anywhere and there is a global distribution of engineering talent — virtual or physical,” Ullal had said in an interview with Times of India in 2023.
Arvind Krishna is the current CEO and chairman of IBM. Born in Dehradun, India, Krishna is an IIT Kanpur alumnus and earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is believed to have moved to the US on an H1-B visa after joining IBM in the 1990s. Over the years, Krishna rose through the ranks as he took on various roles heading teams working on cloud and cognitive software at IBM.
In 2020, Krishna was chosen to be the CEO of IBM. In the past, he has argued that global trade goes hand in hand with allowing overseas talent to flow into the US.
“We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent. And we want to develop our own talent as well, but you can’t develop it as well if you’re not bringing the best people from across the world for our people to learn from too. So we should be an international talent hub, and we should have policies that go along with that,” Krishna said during an onstage interview at the SXSW conference this year.
