For Indians in Georgia, Trump’s new $100K visa fee sows confusion, panic
When Asheesh Sharma first settled in Atlanta in the early 2000s, he remembers there being just a dozen Indian restaurants dotted across the metro area. Now, he estimates that number is likely in the hundreds, a sign of the Indian community’s growth.
As an immigration attorney, Sharma knows H-1B visas for highly skilled, highly educated foreign workers are what helped power the surge of newcomers from his homeland, making Atlanta home to the country’s 10th-largest Indian population. It’s also the visa program that the Trump administration recently sought to throttle by imposing a new $100,000 fee on new applications, to be paid by employers.
“H-1B is what we do day in, day out. It’s our bread and butter,” Sharma said of the law firm he founded in Atlanta, Sharma Law Offices. The Trump policy change “is definitely going to impact firms like us.”
The Trump administration said the fee was designed to encourage U.S. companies to hire Americans, rather than seeking workers from foreign nations.
“Stop bringing in people to take our jobs,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the time.
Supporters of the visas say they often go to people who have specific talents that are in demand.
Reform to the H-1B program is a big concern among the Indian community because those immigrants have reliably accounted for the bulk of visa recipients. Out of the nearly 400,000 H-1B visas approved in fiscal year 2024, 71% went to Indian nationals, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. China came in a distant second with just under 12%.
Most H-1B visa holders come to work in the tech sector. According to USCIS, 64% of 2024 program beneficiaries exercised “computer-related” professions.
The top H-1B employers include tech heavyweights such as Amazon, Meta and Apple, USCIS data shows. The list of notable U.S. tech leaders who were once H-1B visa holders features Satya Nadella, chief executive at Microsoft; Sundar Pichai, chief executive of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet; and Elon Musk, among others.
As an Atlanta-based entrepreneur with decades of leadership experience in the information technology sector, Chand Akkineni estimates that the companies he has led have sponsored around 1,000 H-1B recipients over 30 years.
That hiring would not have happened under the current Trump framework because of the cost — $100,000 per visa application is something only the biggest companies can afford, Akkineni said.
“Small companies will stop (turning to the H-1B program), and they will try to recruit locally,” Akkineni said. “That was the intention” of the policy change.
In a statement, India’s foreign ministry warned of “humanitarian consequences” to Indian families as a result of the new obstacle to joining the U.S. labor market.
In the Sept. 19 executive order that overhauled the H-1B application process, the Trump administration described the visa program as rife with abuse, and as a mechanism that has allowed for the “large-scale replacement” of domestic workers with lower-paid H-1B visa holders.
In a 2020 study, the Economic Policy Institute found that the majority of H-1B employers do pay visa holders less than market rate salaries, in violation of program guidelines.
According to the White House, employers’ widespread use of the H-1B visa to fill entry-level jobs — rather than the highly skilled positions it was intended for — has proved particularly harmful to U.S. college graduates seeking opportunities in the tech industry. The new $100,000 fee comes as computer science majors in the U.S. face some of the highest unemployment rates among college graduates, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Whether positions that would have been filled by H-1B visa holders will now go to U.S. workers is less than certain, according to some experts.
Bhavya Chaudhary, founder and managing attorney of an Atlanta-based immigration law firm, said she has been asking employers about their plans.
“They say: ‘If we need people and we cannot find them here, we’ll go remote,’” she said. “They seem to be saying: ‘This is going to be a solution, where we set up offices overseas and have people sit there and work.’”
The impact of H-1B visa reforms won’t be limited to the tech sector.
“In my own office, I have H-1B holders who are lawyers. We have lots of doctors. We have all these researchers, professors. We routinely file for accountants, hotel managers and so forth. So, it’s not just for tech workers,” Chaudhary said.
The administration allayed some concerns when it announced earlier this week that the six-figure fee applies only to new H-1B applicants who are living abroad and not to people already on the country — including, for instance, Indian international students already in the U.S. on student visas who may hope to stay after graduation.
Still, Sharma said Indian immigrants in Georgia are wary of more changes. He said many Indian nationals are putting plans to travel back to India on hold to ensure they won’t run into trouble trying to reenter the country.
“If there is an emergency in family, a loved one is sick or if there is a marriage, occasions which they definitely don’t want to miss, they may take a risk based on whatever they hear coming out of Washington, but as of now, all those plans are put on hold until they have clarity,” Sharma said.
According to Chaudhary, the uncertainty comes from the reform being a unilateral action from the Trump administration, and not from a more deliberative process in Congress.
“You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe the government will change its mind.”
Indian Immigrants in Georgia
Population of largest immigrant groups in Georgia
- Mexico: 239,566
- India: 112,071
- Guatemala: 53,989
- Jamaica: 53,384
- Vietnam: 47,438
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Georgia counties with the largest number of Indian immigrants
- Fulton: 27,664
- Forsyth: 23,021
- Gwinnett: 15,563
- Cobb: 12,838
- DeKalb: 9,233
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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