Trump to Indian Freshers: Pay ₹85 Lakh or Stay in Bengaluru Forever
Goldmedia.in | No PR. Just Perspective
“Congratulations! You got a job at TCS with ₹1 lakh monthly pay. Here’s your U.S. ticket.”
Pause. Trump enters.
“Sorry kid, before you board that plane, please drop ₹85 lakh at the White House counter.”
Yes, that’s the absurd new reality. President Donald Trump has turned the H-1B visa — once the middle-class Indian’s ladder to the American Dream — into a billionaire’s toll road. If your company can’t burn a small fortune upfront, you don’t even get to stamp your boarding pass.
The Trump Tax on Dreams
What Trump signed on 19 September is not just policy. It’s a blunt message to Indian techies: “We don’t want your freshers. We don’t want your ₹1 lakh coders. Unless you’re rare, expensive, and worth a king’s ransom — stay out.”
Every H-1B entry from abroad now requires an extra $100,000 fee (₹85 lakh). This is not immigration reform; it’s immigration auction.
Why a Fresher Stands No Chance
Take a bright engineering graduate in India, hired by TCS at ₹1 lakh per month. A solid middle-class job. But to send this fresher to the U.S., TCS would now need to cough up ₹85 lakh just to open the door. That’s 7 years’ salary paid in advance — not to the employee, but to the U.S. government.
Why would any company do that? The math is insane.
The Death of the Onsite Dream
For 20 years, Indian families lived on a rhythm: “Beta will get placed in Infosys or TCS, do 2–3 years in Bangalore, then go to U.S. on H-1B, buy a house, live the American dream.”
Trump just took a bulldozer to that story. Ordinary Indian engineers are out. The H-1B has become a VIP lounge where only CEOs, rare experts, or million-dollar consultants get the golden pass.
Offshore Is the New America
Instead of sending armies of coders to Dallas or San Jose, IT majors will simply say: “Sit in Chennai. Code from Pune. Deliver from Hyderabad.” The projects will keep flowing, but the U.S. trip will not.
For a whole generation of freshers, this means America will remain a screensaver on their laptops, not a stamp in their passport.
Bottomline
Trump didn’t technically abolish H-1B. He did something worse: he priced it out of reach for 99% of Indians. The H-1B is dead for the middle class. It survives only for the elite.
The American Dream is no longer about hard work. It’s about hard cash.
✍️ Authored by Nilesh Lodha — Goldmedia.in | Bold Truths. No PR. Just Perspective
(All ideation, concept, headlines and section-wise structuring by the author; editorial refinement and language styling by the Goldmedia.in Editorial Team.)
