US President Donald Trump is at it again. A year after he first proposed $100,000 fees on H-1B Visa applications, which a US court deemed invalid, he has reimposed a $103,265 fee through a different route. To be sure, the proposal is not yet in effect and is currently in a 30-day period seeking public comments. When Trump first imposed the $100,000 fees, HT published a detailed analysis of how it meant effectively killing the programme as the entry-level median
- Uncertainty is the only policy under Trump 2.0From tariffs, to the war in Iran to visa policies, the US under Trump 2.0 has become a completely unpredictable beast. The result shows in the historic spike in the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index values for the US after Trump won the elections in 2024. Everybody else, inside and outside the US, is paying the costs of this high uncertainty, which is made even worse by inconsistency.
- India is the biggest beneficiary of the H-1B visa programmeThis is the most important fact as far as the Indo-US bilateral relationship is concerned. 60% of all H-1B visas issued between 1997 and 2024 (the latest period for which annual data is available) went to Indians. Clearly, the US administration is aware of this fact. The H-1B visa fee comes back shortly after the Trump administration proposed another policy which would hurt Indians the most – a $100,000 fee on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme. India has been sending the maximum number of students to the US in the recent past.
- India is not the only US ally suffering at the hands of the Trump administrationThe H-1B visa announcement comes days after the breakdown of US-Canada trade talks, which the Canadians alleged was because of the US suddenly changing its position and speaking in multiple voices during the negotiations. The Trump administration and Trump himself has also targeted many others US allies in Europe and East Asia. This has led to a predictable fall in the US’s popularity among citizens of these countries, even as their governments continue to negotiate with the US given its economic importance in the world. A comparison of data from 2023 and 2026 Pew Surveys shows that share of respondents who viewed the US favourably has fallen in most countries for which comparable data is available. Ironical as it sounds, China has been gaining popularity in many countries during this period. Trump and Trump alone is to blame for this. The fall in US’s popularity is not just a subjective feeling. It is also affecting decisions such as foreign students going to US universities, which is facing other policy headwinds such as cap on the number of years for different types of student/scholarly visas and proposed $100,000 fee on OPT programme.
- US is becoming a bully when it is being bullied itself by the ultimate bully, bond marketsWhile the original traction for going after a programme like the H-1B visa comes from Trump’s nativist MAGA base, it might very well be the case that the second order temptation to resort to such policies is coming out of fiscal constraints facing the US government. The US government’s debt touched an all-time high of $40 trillion last week, which triggered a sell-off in US treasury bonds and is testing the prowess of its Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent right now. “The (US) government projects it would make roughly $8.8 billion in revenue from the new fee to fund the immigration system”, a WSJ story on the new H-1B visa fees said. Dissuading high-skilled workers from coming to the US, punishing its allies with hostile policies while doing deals with its strategic adversaries and doing nothing to address the systemic contradictions within the US are all policies which will hurt rather than help US’s long-term interests.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Shreya Khandelwal is a trainee (data) at Hindustan Times and part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Her primary responsibility on the team is to cover economic stories using publicly-available datasets. She also contributes to reporting on the economy for the newspaper's business section. Before joining the Hindustan Times newsroom in June 2026, she completed her MA in Economics from Azim Premji University and BA (Prog.) in Economics and Mathematics from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. During her master's, she interned at the Centre for Analytical Finance (Indian School of Business), where she provided inputs on the industrial sector for the Telangana Rising 2047 vision project and the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) where she worked on industrial pathways in developed and developing countries and foreign trade agreements.