U.S. President Donald Trump’s move to curtail H-1B visas threatens to rewrite the rules for one of India’s biggest business success stories, a decades-old model that’s grown into a $280 billion industry and underpins much of the technology behind the world’s largest corporations.
Trump's order on Friday — which requires a $100,000 fee for H-1B applications — will likely force a major shift for Indian outsourcers led by Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, who use the program to deploy tens of thousands of engineers across American clients from Citigroup to Walmart. The two Indian software exporters’ shares slid more than 3% on Monday.
The abrupt move — a response in part to accusations of abuse — forces Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to once again deal with the fallout from "America First" policies. Companies from TCS to Wipro have been hailed as a touchstone of Indian technological achievement, helping create high-skilled jobs for the world’s most populous economy since the idea of outsourced information technology gained currency around the 1990s. Trump deals a blow to some of India’s most valuable companies at a time they’re grappling with IT cutbacks because of geopolitical and economic uncertainty.
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