Trump Renews $100,000 H-1B Fee for Another Year, Congress Leader Pawan Khera Warns of Fallout for Indian IT

President Donald Trump signed an executive order and a proclamation on Friday, September 18, 2026, extending the $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B visa petitions for another 12 months, according to a White House fact sheet cited by edexlive and Newsable (Asianet News). The order also directs the Departments of State, Labor and Homeland Security to scrutinize H-1B applications from employers with recent or planned layoffs of similarly situated American workers.

The fee itself isn't new. It was first imposed on September 19, 2025, exactly a year before this extension. The administration is keeping it in place for another year and adding a layoffs-screening requirement on top of it.

What the White House claims the fee has done

According to the White House fact sheet, H-1B registrations by the largest IT outsourcing firms have dropped 92% since the fee took effect last September. The same fact sheet says demand for consular processing of H-1B petitions has fallen nearly 97%. Those numbers come directly from the administration's own accounting and haven't been independently verified by any of the outlets covering this story.

The executive order also directs State, Labor and Homeland Security to consult with the Commerce Department, the Education Department and the Small Business Administration to gather data on wages, industry conditions and employment specialization tied to the H-1B program, per the fact sheet.

Khera's response

Senior Congress leader Pawan Khera posted on X on Saturday, September 19, 2026, laying out four specific concerns, as reported by edexlive, Newsable, Jammu Links News and Dainik Jagran. Khera said the extension will make it harder for Indian students on F-1 visas to move into the U.S. workforce, that smaller American firms may simply stop sponsoring H-1B workers altogether, that professionals may increasingly look to the UK, Canada and Australia instead, and that reduced migration could eventually shrink remittances flowing back to India.

Khera didn't cite independent data behind these predictions. They're his own assessment of likely downstream effects, and a reasonable one given that Indian nationals have historically received the majority of H-1B visas issued each year. Whether the effects play out exactly as he describes depends on how employers actually respond to a permanent six-figure cost per hire, something that will only be visible in hiring data over the coming year.

Khera then turned the visa fee into a domestic political attack, writing on X: "Modi bent over backwards to appease Trump. Trump got the appeasement. India took the humiliation and the hit." That's Khera's characterization of the Modi government's diplomatic approach to Washington. None of the sources include a response from the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian government to that specific charge, so it stands as one opposition leader's claim, not an established fact about what concessions, if any, India actually made in exchange for anything on H-1B policy.

The administration's stated rationale

The White House frames the fee and the layoffs-screening rule as an integrity measure aimed at stopping companies from using the H-1B program to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor, according to the fact sheet referenced by Newsable and edexlive. That's a longstanding complaint from labor advocates and immigration hawks on both sides of the aisle, not just this administration. Big IT outsourcing firms have been accused for years of flooding the H-1B lottery with high-volume, lower-wage applications, and a 92% self-reported drop in filings from those firms, if accurate, would suggest the fee is doing exactly what the administration says it set out to do.

The genuine tension here is between two legitimate interests neither side disputes: protecting the pipeline for global tech talent that U.S. companies say they need, and preventing wage suppression or displacement of American workers, which is the administration's stated justification. The sources don't include pushback from the tech industry or from Indian IT firms like TCS, Infosys or Wipro on this specific extension, so their response to a second year of the fee remains an open question.

What happens next depends on two things nobody has answered yet: whether any legal challenge to the renewed fee or the layoffs-screening rule gets filed, and how the upcoming H-1B registration cycle actually performs once employers factor in a guaranteed second year of the $100,000 charge.