A small visa suddenly sparked a huge wave. The United States and India, this complicated partnership, suddenly broke?

The cause of the matter is a new visa policy that officially landed in the United States. The core content is one: the application fee for the H-1B work visa, from the original thousands of dollars, rose to 100,000 dollars.

The news comes out that the world's most burning pot, not elsewhere, is the United States and India. The two countries on social media, filled with anger and blasphemy against each other, full of fire medicine.

To put it logically, the U.S. visa policy is global and not specifically tailored for your Indian family.Why can such a visa clearly put the huge cracks in U.S.-India relations on the table?

Behind that, it is obviously not so simple.

To understand this problem, we must first understand what this H-1B visa is.

The H-1B visa is a temporary work visa in the United States, not an immigrant visa. It is valid for three years and can be extended to six years. The annual quota is 65,000, and another 20,000 is dedicated to applicants who have obtained a master's degree or above in the United States.

The H-1B visa was originally established to introduce global elites to American companies. Of course, this also includes India.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, both embarked on the American technology stage with H-1B.

Alvin Krishna, the current CEO of International Business Machinery Corporation (IBM) in the United States, is also a representative of H-1B immigrants. He is an Indian engineer who took over IBM in 2020, taking the company to the forefront of artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud and quantum technology.

In other words, U.S. innovation is closely linked to those highly skilled foreign talents, including those from India.

This is why there are many angry voices after the visa tightening. Everyone is worried that tightening visas will restrict the development of the U.S. technology industry.

On the other hand, many Americans are also calling for tightening the visa policy.

In their view, after the visa tightening, U.S. companies could at least prioritize the hiring of American workers, in particular to prevent so-called "Indian immigration fraud", blocking the gaps that Indians rely on low wage demands, bulk applications, and masses.

According to last year¡¯s data, 71 percent of U.S. H-1B visas were taken away by Indians.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of applications come from India.

The U.S. Immigration Bureau was only allowed to take the "random lottery", but because the absolute majority of Indians in the application base, the result is still that the majority of the seats fall into the hands of Indians.

Although the Indians who won the ballot are all related to the technology industry, they are roughly divided into two categories. As can be seen from the figure below, American technology companies and Indian outsourcing companies have always been the largest number of visa applications.

They are obviously the targets of key attacks:

U.S. native tech giants, directly recruit Indian engineers. Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., because of artificial intelligence, cloud computing outbreak, the demand for highly skilled foreign talent has increased significantly, and the number of directly applying for H-1B has also increased.

Indian outsourcing companies, on the other hand, rely on low-cost labor to contract orders. They outsourced IT system development, maintenance, technical support, and back-office operations back to India, and then sent engineers and project managers directly to the offices of American customers. These people rely almost entirely on H-1B visas. Typical representatives are Indian IT service giants such as Infosys and TCS. They are headquartered in India but have branches in the United States and are responsible for connecting customers.

It can be said that the new visa policy of the United States has accurately targeted India's "life gate"-relying on visas to outsource technical services is the pillar of India's service trade.

In India, software giant Infosys has obtained 2504 initial H-1B approvals for the financial year 2024.

According to the new rules, the company will pay an additional US$250 million for visa fees alone, and its profits will directly evaporate US$250 million. As soon as the news broke, the company's share price fell 3.4% that day.

More than 60% of the export market of India's IT service industry is in the United States.

Once the United States restricts expatriates, Indian companies can only temporarily transfer their business back to China or nearby countries for digestion. The impact on the Indian economy can be imagined.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the US-India relationship will therefore appear new cracks.

But if you think this is just a dispute over visas, make it simple. As Reuters commented:

The US visa policy amendment is a service trade dispute between the United States and India.

In fact, trade in services is just a microcosm of the continued bad relationship between the United States and India. The United States has closed more than one door to India.

Just this year, the two sides were equally ¡°controversial¡± in commodity trade.

The trade talks between the United States and India have not made much progress, and in June, while India had opened up some of its agricultural products to the U.S., the U.S. continued to step forward, demanding that the Indian market for dairy and agricultural products be massively opened.

But dairy products are India's red line, which affects the livelihoods of about 80 million small farmers. In India, cows are a source of wealth for almost every farmer. In order to protect this industry, India has huge dairy cooperatives and federations, covering almost all farmers across the country. If the United States wants to open up the dairy market, it will be tantamount to directly impacting this huge community of interests. India naturally would not agree.

In August, the United States threatened to impose additional tariffs on the grounds that India bought Russian oil, which directly led to the cancellation of a round of negotiations.

£ü£üIn Mumbai, India, an artist creates works protesting Trump¡¯s tariffs on the Incas.

There is no clear progress in the negotiations between the two sides.

It is precisely because the United States has increased H-1B fees and imposed tariffs on India that Indian Foreign Minister Sujaysen recently stated that the time of increasing visa fees has become a node for India to seek new trade arrangements.

So you see, from visas for talent flow, to daily necessities trade, to international strategy, between the United States and India, there has been a comprehensive and deep rift. The skyrocketing visa fee is just the latest and most dramatic scene.

Finally, Tanner would like to share two opinions.

First, the U.S. struck India¡¯s plate and also demolished the wall of its own Silicon Valley.

Second, it makes us see more clearly how fragile the so-called "allies" are.

Original title: "Yuyuantan Sky: America Closes the Door to India"

Column editor-in-chief: Qin Hong Editor: Lu Xiaochuan Source: Xinhua Agency

Source: Author: Yu Yuan Tan Tian