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On building in India because of US visa policy

Don’t let immigration policy design your org chart.

A rule arrived, companies restructured around it, and then a court vacated it. Anyone who moved roles offshore purely because of that fee now owns a decision made on the basis of something that isn’t in force.

What actually happened

On 19 September 2025 a presidential proclamation introduced a $100,000 payment as a condition of eligibility for new H-1B petitions filed from 21 September. Petitions filed without proof of payment or an exemption would be denied.

For a mid-sized company hiring a handful of specialists a year, that changed the arithmetic completely. Plenty of boards responded the way you would expect, by asking what could be built in India instead.

Then on 8 June 2026 a federal district court vacated the guidance implementing the payment, and on 24 July the First Circuit declined to stay that ruling pending appeal. The government disagrees and is complying while it considers what to do next.

So the position today is that the fee which drove a wave of offshoring decisions is not currently enforceable, and nobody can tell you with confidence what it looks like in twelve months.

Two ways to get this wrong

Both were reasonable responses to the information available at the time.

You moved roles because of the fee

If the India decision was justified to the board on a hundred thousand dollars a head, the justification has evaporated and the commitments haven’t. A lease, an entity and a team are much harder to reverse than a policy is. The question now is whether the decision stands on its own merits, and that’s worth answering honestly rather than quietly hoping nobody asks.

You waited, and you’re still exposed

The appeal is live and the underlying policy direction hasn’t changed. Companies that did nothing are one ruling away from the original problem, with nothing built here and a hiring market that has had a year’s head start.

The better reason to build here

India’s capability sector did not grow because of American visa policy. It grew because revenue went from $40.4 billion in FY19 to $64.6 billion in FY24, across more than 1,700 centres employing over 19 lakh people, and because the country holds 28% of the world’s STEM workforce.

None of that depends on who is in the White House. It was true before September 2025 and they’ll be true whichever way the appeal goes. A plan resting on them survives a change of administration. A plan resting on a fee does not.

The practical test I’d apply is simple. If the H-1B position reverted entirely tomorrow, would you still want this team? If the answer is yes, build it properly, with a leader hired for the long version of the job. If the answer is no, you’re building a hedge, and a hedge staffed by people who think they’re building a business is a bad arrangement for everyone.

What this does to the hire

Uncertainty of this kind shapes the brief more than people expect. Someone running a team that may or may not have a US counterpart in two years has to be comfortable with not knowing, which is not a thing you can read off a CV, and willing to talk about it openly rather than pretend the question isn’t there.

It also changes what you can promise. Senior candidates here are well aware of how quickly foreign companies reverse India decisions, and they will ask what happens to this team if policy shifts again. Being straight about the uncertainty tends to land better than a confidence nobody believes. The people who join on a clear-eyed version of the risk are also the people who stay when it materialises.

It also sharpens the question of who actually decides things. Indians currently hold roughly 10 to 13% of leadership positions in these centres. A candidate weighing a role at a company that has just been visibly knocked about by US policy will want to know whether real decisions will sit here or be recalled to head office the moment things get difficult.

The judgment

Policy will keep moving. It moved twice in ten months, in opposite directions, and the appeal isn’t finished.

Building capability in India because it makes the company better is a durable decision. Building it to avoid a fee is a bet on a particular legal outcome, placed by people with no control over it, and that distinction tends to surface eighteen months later in a board meeting when somebody asks why the team exists.

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