MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
As of Sunday, it now costs $100,000 to apply for a certain type of work visa. The H-1B visa is overwhelmingly used by Indian nationals to work in U.S. tech firms. As NPR's Diaa Hadid reports from Mumbai, it's causing confusion and concern in India.
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UNIDENTIFIED CAPTAIN: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Due to the current circumstance...
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: As news of the fee hike filtered out on Friday, passengers try to exit a plane that was meant to depart from San Francisco to India. They were apparently afraid they'd be denied reentry without paying $100,000. In a video filmed by a passenger, picked up by Indian outlet Firstpost, the captain calls the circumstances unprecedented and says passengers are free to leave.
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UNIDENTIFIED CAPTAIN: Yeah, we are aware there's a number of passengers that do not wish to travel with us.
HADID: Only after clarifications and corrections from the White House did the details become clearer. The fee for a new H-1B visa would cost $100,000. Still, for many Indians, it was another body blow from the Trump administration, which recently slapped India with 50% tariffs on some industries. Sudhanshu Kaushik, the founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, said the move felt deliberately intended to make Indians feel unwelcome in the U.S. at a time when...
SUDHANSHU KOUSHIK: The hate online and the hate in person on the ground, I have never seen it to the degree in which it penetrates, and it is specifically targeting Indians.
HADID: H-1B visas have long been contentious, and they've united odd bedfellows, from MAGA ideologue Steve Bannon to the populist left icon Senator Bernie Sanders. Both see it as a vehicle to allow big companies to bring in cheap, foreign labor to replace Americans who'd be paid higher wages. And that seemed to be the point of the dramatic fee hike. This is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He spoke after the president signed the proclamation in audio picked up by Firstpost.
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HOWARD LUTNICK: Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs.
HADID: But Tanul Thakur, an Indian national and author of a forthcoming book about the H-1B visa system, says this fee hike is performative.
TANUL THAKUR: It's a political stunt and not even a good one at that.
HADID: Thakur says this fee increase does nothing to rein in the dizzying loopholes that companies exploit to bring in foreign workers and to underpay them. But Thakur says he hopes that from this chaos, there might be some real reform.
Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Mumbai. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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