THE CONGRESS party launched an attack on the Narendra Modi government on Saturday, accusing it of bending over backward to appease US President Donald Trump only to watch India absorb the fallout, after Trump extended the punishing $100,000 H-1B visa fee for another year.
"Trump has extended the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for another 12 months — a move that will hit Indian IT, tech professionals and the student talent pipeline hard," Congress's media and publicity department head Pawan Khera said in a blistering post on X.
Trump extends $100,000 H-1B fee for another year
He warned the fallout would be sweeping: Indian students frozen out of the US workforce, smaller firms abandoning sponsorships altogether, a potential exodus of talent to the UK, Canada and Australia, and a longer-term hit to remittances flowing back to India.
"Modi bent over backward to appease Trump. Trump got the appeasement. India took the humiliation and the hit," Khera said, framing the episode as proof that India's diplomatic goodwill had bought nothing but a fresh economic blow to its own workforce.
The criticism lands squarely on a policy with real teeth. Trump's presidential proclamation, issued Friday, extends by a year the $100,000 payment requirement on certain H-1B petitions — a measure the White House itself says triggered a 92 percent collapse in H-1B registrations by large IT outsourcing firms since 2025.
L-1 visa cool-off rule sparks concern among workers
Indians remain by far the largest beneficiaries of the H-1B program, meaning the extension disproportionately affects Indian applicants and the firms that employ them.
Trump compounded the pressure with a separate order tightening scrutiny of H-1B applications, directing US agencies to weigh recent or planned layoffs of American workers when reviewing petitions — a move the White House framed as protecting American jobs, but one that gives Congress further ammunition to argue Indian professionals are being squeezed from both sides.
