US can’t find the tech talent that India has, an immigration agency founder has said commenting on the H-1B visa fee.
As the debate over the $100,000 fee for the H-1B visa since September 21, 2025, is still going on, a CEO of an India-based immigration agency has recently commented that the visa fee is definitely America’s loss. For a CBS News program on India’s IT sector and H-1B, Xavier Fernandes, the founder of immigration agency Y-Axis, said many tech CEOs are from India’s Hyderabad and the city is a breeding ground of tech. This type of tech talent can’t be manufactured in the US, he said. “Indians are the new oil, coal, or gas, it’s brain power to run the modern day industries,” Fernandes said. “That kind of talent you can’t manufacture. It’s not a thing that you can get it locally.”Fernandes said many Indians will now stay back and build India. The CBS report spoke to several techies who expressed their frustration and fear over the H-1B fee. One of them was Rajesh Jaknalli who worked for a US rech company in Hyderabad for about 10 years ad he said his one goal was to get an opportunity one day to move to the US. “Our dream was to perform, give you 100%, and then probably, we’ll get a chance to move to the US,” Jaknalli said to CBS’s Shanelle Kaul. Another techie Hameed Abdul said he decided to move to Canada as the fee spelled an end to his American dream. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham reacted to the interview and commented how this practice indulged in industruial scale fraud and job and wage theft of American workers. Laura Ingraham was the one who countered President Donald Trump during an interview when the president said US needs to bring in talent from outside. Ingraham said US had plenty of talented people. “No you don’t…You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn,” Trump said, shutting Ingraham. Recent data from the Department of Labor shows that big tech’s H-1B filings fell sharply late last year after the new visa fee kicked in. Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — also among the biggest visa sponsors — saw their certified applications drop from a year earlier. At Meta and Google, they dropped by roughly half. Only Nvidia’s H-1B filings increased from 369 in Q1 2025 to 434 in Q1 2026, in tune with what CEO Jensen Huang affirmed that his company would continue hiring H-1Bs despite the new fee.
Who pays the new H-1B fee
Companies hiring employees on H-1B visa program who are not present in the US and therefore have to undergo the consular process have to pay the $100,000 fee. Those who are hiring foreigners but who are already in the US on some other visa will not have to pay the fee.
