BANGALORE, India — Earlier this week, President Donald Trump made surprising comments about legal immigration.
In an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the president defended the H-1B visa program.
“If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” Ingraham said.
“I agree, but you also have to bring in talent,” Trump responded. When Ingraham pushed back, saying, “We have plenty of talented people” in the U.S.”
“No, you don’t, no you don’t … you don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn,” Trump said.
But his vice president, JD Vance, said America needs to “empower” blue-collar workers instead of replacing them with foreign-born labor, signaling a rift in the administration.
“If you use technology and you empower the blue-collar workers rather than replace them with foreign labor, I think they are going to do way better. They are going to make higher wages and the whole country is going to be better off,” he said.
“In other words, do you depend on low-wage immigrants or do you depend on American citizens bolstered by technology and innovation? That’s the Trump model.”
In September, the Trump White House rolled out a change to the H1-B work visa policy: a $100,000 fee for new applications meant to be paid by the employers.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, more than 70% of H-1B visas were granted to workers from India.
Utahns in India react to H-1B policy
On the ground in India, a Utah delegation on a trade mission has sat in many meetings with various Indian states. Most times, state officials skirted around the issue. But an overall consensus among politicians and experts emerged that the Indian and American federal governments will sort it out.
“I think the arc of the universe always bends toward the good over the long term,” state Sen. Dan McCay said. He is part of the trade delegation to India among other Utah lawmakers, businesses and academics.
The delegates traveled to seven Indian cities over a course of two weeks.
This diplomatic visit is a sort of homecoming for the legislator who served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this South Asian country. “That is actually a teaching of Guru Swami Vivekananda,” McCay added, referring to a Hindu monk, philosopher and religious teacher. “You have to find a balance.”
“The short term tends to feel like there’s an emergency, or it must be fixed,” he told the Deseret News in the lobby of the Taj Hotel in Bangalore. He said that the Trump administration’s move is triggering “a reset of the conversation.”
“There is merit in looking at our immigration policies and making sure that we are accomplishing (our) goals,” the state senator said.
“Over the long term, isolationism is not a path forward for the world. It’s not a path forward for anybody, really,” McCay told the Deseret News.
India faces similar problems, the state senator said.
“They don’t necessarily want a flood of engineers … to come from another country and take a bunch of jobs from people that are then willing to work for less or whatever,” he said.
McCay added, “In fact, it would be harder for me to get a visa to come and work in India than it is for H-1Bs.”
In a statement to the Deseret News on the final day of the trade mission to India, Utah state Rep. Matt MacPherson said the “overuse and lack of good controls led to its misuse for positions we could and were able to fill with U.S. workers.”
“It became a messy, bloated and flawed system over time and desperately needed an overhaul,” he added.
Like Mckay, MacPherson said he expects the “shake-ups” triggered by the Trump administration to lead to “a better H-1B system” at present and “protect it for the future.”
Guruprasad Sowle, the president and cofounder of Indus International Research Foundation and an advisory board member at World Trade Center Utah, said he expects the policy to eliminate “average workers” from the pipeline.
It will also prevent Indian-based staffing companies that funnel employees to the U.S. from misusing the American legal immigration system and violating the wage rules, as the Economic Policy Institute found in 2021.
“It’s not going to impact the existing H-1B,” Sowle noted. Nor will it effect those immigrants who are changing their visa status without leaving the country. That includes international college students on an F1 student visa who switch to H-1B status after graduation.
Silicon Valley giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon will likely continue to hire the best talent irrespective of the cost, but mid-size and smaller companies may struggle to hire foreign workers.
“The benefit of the doubt that the IT industry is giving to this entire $100,000 issue is that this is a passing phase,” said Sowle.
“India and the U.S. are so strategic in their relationship. It’s so deep, they cannot afford to have this impasse for a long time,” he added.
Sowle said the Indian lobby in the U.S. is working with the U.S. government to soften the blow of the $100,000 fee.
Democratic Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthy of Illinois and Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley as well as the Indian Commerce Ministry are quietly at the forefront of these conversations, Sowle said during a conversation over dinner in Hyderabad, one of the stops for Utah’s trade delegation.
“Whether it’s tariffs or the H-1B, what we’re seeing is not policy,” he said, calling it a “wild reaction” from the Trump White House.
Sowle speculated that when the six-figure fee kicks in, he wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. backtracks and postpones the policy for another year. “Anything is possible,” he added.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi shares a strong relationship with President Donald Trump, he added.
The American Dream in India
While in Bangalore, MacPherson said he came to appreciate the work visa program’s importance to India.
“Vast numbers of H1B workers have come to the U.S. to learn and do a job; we mutually share cultures, they then return home and build businesses and build the American dream for themselves in India,” he said.
“America doesn’t have to have a monopoly on success and it would be better for the world if they can build successful economies, free markets and live the American dream at home.”
At a Corporate Connect event, attended by the trade delegation in Bangalore, one Indian business owner offered his perspective on the fast-changing work visa policies.
“What I have been seeing is people are reaching out and they are saying that bringing talent is tougher there, so we just want to set up a local team in India and get things done,” said Anshumali Jain, the founder of Celebto Tech, an India-based company that works with startups to create foundational teams India, on Wednesday evening.
In 2011, InMobi, an Indian mobile advertising company, achieved unicorn status, touching a valuation of over $1 billion.
“Now, every 100 days, someone or the other says we are a unicorn. The talent is increasing. The speed at which India is growing is crazy. So not having an India strategy is not a good idea,” Jain said.
“The dearth of H-1B will drive more business toward India,” while slowing down the “hyper growth” that foreign workers fueled in the U.S, he said.
Concurring with Trump, Jain pointed to the shortage of American talent as a problem. He pointed to the outskirts of Chicago, home to insurance firms, as an example.
“How many of those states have enough graduates to fill those 100,000 jobs? You don’t even have the 100,000 population in some areas,” Jain said. He had previously been on the H-1B visa for six years.
“I have paid taxes of more than $800,000 over 10 years. Why wouldn’t you want me there?” he said.