Days after United States President Donald Trump signed a proclamation under which a $100,000 fee must be paid for every new H-1B visa petition filed after September 21, Congress leader and Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor, called it a decision taken to appease Trump’s “so-called MAGA” supporters.
Speaking to ANI on Monday, Tharoor mentioned that the sudden hike in H-1B visa fees is about America’s domestic politics and the President is trying to gain support of the anti-immigration base. It is worth noting that the US legislative elections are set for November this year.
“Again, the motives are principally driven by domestic politics. Trump believes, and the people around him have told him, that the easy H-1B has meant that a lot of Americans who deserve a higher salary from the same companies are being bypassed by Indians who will accept a lower salary,” Tharoor said in an interview with ANI.
Tharoor linked the move to the broader political climate in the US. “Today, the dominant political forces of the so-called MAGA movement are very openly anti-immigrants, and particularly visible immigrants, people of a different colour who can be spotted as not of the white ethnic mainstream,” he said.
The former Union minister explained that Trump’s supporters see Indian professionals as undercutting American workers, who work for a lesser salary than the average American.
“An Indian techie who comes and works for sixty thousand dollars a year is taking away, according to Trump’s supporters, jobs from an American who would not work for less than eighty-five or ninety thousand dollars a year,” he said.
According to Tharoor, the decision to raise visa fees to as high as $100,000 was meant to make low- and mid-level jobs “unviable.” “So only the high-end, really desirable, irreplaceable top people who are worth it for a company to spend a hundred thousand dollars, only they will come,” he added.
The Congress MP also added that the measure may eventually backfire on the US economy. “The obvious solution will be to outsource the job. What used to be done in America can now be done either in multinational company units in Europe or in their global capability centres in India,” he added.
He pointed out that after these increased fees, there is a chance that Indian tech workers may still end up doing the same work for American firms, only from India instead of the US.
Raising concern for Indian IT companies, Tharoor said the new fee structure would make many contracts unviable for Indian tech companies. “We cannot pay a hundred thousand dollars per person to go off and do a contract which is actually a low-end contract,” he said.
