Indians are celebrating new regulations that exempt migrant students from President Donald Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B outsourcing workers.
“HUGE Immigration News!” declared Deedy Das, an Indian migrant who boasted of using other Indians to help him win an O-1 work visa. “If you studied in the US, the [Trump $100,000] fee doesn’t affect you. I’m now positive on this rule!”
“MASSIVE loophole,” tweeted immigration lawyer Charles Kuck. “[If] You come as a visitor/student/other nonimmigrant visa, you don’t need to pay the fee.”
“Game change for foreign grads,” declared Atal Agarwal, an advocate for Indian migrants:
Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee won’t apply to: – Students switching from F-1 to H-1B inside the US – Current H-1B holders extending their status – Any status changes happening domestically
Only affects NEW petitions for workers outside the country
The loophole and celebrations may reverse the recent decline in the huge number of Indians who enroll in U.S. universities to get four years of white-collar work permits.
The work permits are distributed via President George W. Bush’s huge Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs. In 2024, for example, White House officials granted work permits to 400,000 foreign graduates to help them take the career-starting jobs needed by U.S. graduates.
Many of the foreign graduates are hired for U.S. jobs via ethnic networks that exclude American professionals. The foreign graduates are also aided by low-wage, low-tax loopholes in employment laws.
Also, CEOs know that most foreign graduates will submissively work longer hours for less pay in the hope that the employers will nominate them for green cards and citizenship.
The result is that up to one-half of new U.S. technology graduates are being pushed out of their career tracks.
The work permits are especially valuable for foreign migrants because they help fund their stay in the United States while they apply to the H-1B lottery for the visas that include the option of residency and citizenship.
Now the loophole also ensures that more U.S. employers are likely to pick more U.S.-based foreign graduates for the roughly 110,000 new H-1B visas that are handed out each year. There is no cap to the annual inflow of H-1B workers.
That would be a dramatic reversal from recent months, when the inflow of foreign graduates was falling rapidly.
Since Trump’s election, many foreign students — especially Indians — have begun looking elsewhere than the U.S. job market. Many are trying to get into U.K., German, or Irish universities, which also earn revenues by allowing foreign graduates to take jobs away from home-country graduates.
At least one million Indians have moved into U.S. white-collar jobs via the various visa programs.
The India-based Hindustan Times reported the shift on October 7:
“I have never seen anything like this in 30 years,” says Mrinalini Batra, a higher studies counsellor who has helped dozens of Indian students find their way into America’s most prestigious universities.
Batra is referring to a slew of measures enacted by the US President Donald Trump administration in recent months, from time-limiting foreign student visas and hiking H1B visa fees to demanding a 15% cap on international students at US universities. Taken together, the measures seem to mark a concerted effort to restrict the number of foreign students entering America.
…
“I know a friend who took $80,000 in debt to get a master’s degree in architecture from a top US university and now her US firm has told her they will not sponsor her for a visa. So she’s going to come back to India. It’s definitely something I have to consider,” says one Indian student who is looking at studying MBA in America.
“The number of Indians arriving in America on student visas fell by 44.5% in August 2025 compared to last year. July saw a similarly precipitous drop, with the number of arrivals dropping by roughly 46%,” the newspaper reported.
“The US is no longer as attractive for international students as it once was,” Das complained on October 10, before the new regulations were issued.
“Applications to U.S. business schools slumped this year as many international students, worried about tighter visa restrictions, opted for schools closer to home,” the Wall Street Journal reported on October 21. It added:
While international applications to U.S. business schools were down 3% in the latest survey of nearly 1,200 programs at 326 business schools located in 41 countries, the drop was more pronounced in Canada and the U.K., where visa requirements became stricter.
Instead, many foreign graduates are looking for work in Asian and Europe, the journal noted:
Worldwide, applications to business-school programs increased 7% this year, GMAC reported, thanks to sizable jumps in international applications across Asia, India and Europe. In East Asia, including China, international applications were up 42%. In India, they were 26% higher. And Europe registered a 9% increase.
On September 19, Trump announced the new $100,000 fee for H-1B migrants at U.S. airports in 2026, saying:
Some employers, using practices now widely adopted by entire sectors, have abused the H-1B statute and its regulations to artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens, while at the same time making it more difficult to attract and retain the highest skilled subset of temporary workers, with the largest impact seen in critical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
The number of foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time. Among computer and math occupations, the foreign share of the workforce grew from 17.7 percent in 2000 to 26.1 percent in 2019. And the key facilitator for this influx of foreign STEM labor has been the abuse of the H-1B visa.
Breitbart News has extensively covered companies’ unpopular use of the allegedly nepotistic, fraud-ridden, criminal, discriminatory, incompetent, costly, and counterproductive H-1B program.
The huge inflow of foreign graduates into white-collar careers is also wrecking American-style professionalism, corporate innovation, citizens’ privacy, regulatory enforcement, and the federal government’s alleged national security priorities.
American tech workers are speaking up against the program — and are using their hard-earned familiarity with the visa worker system to expose the mass replacement of American graduates, the damage to innovation, and the declining U.S. technological lead over China.
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