Amazon top H-1B hirer, TCS & Infosys to bear brunt

US President Donald Trump’s $100,000 price tag for new H-1B workers hired from outside the US will have punishing effects for the IT outsourcing and staffing industries that have long been a target of both parties.

The fee is the biggest restriction the Trump administration has imposed so far on employment of skilled foreign workers.

A Bloomberg analysis found it will have a disproportionate impact on multinational staffing firms that act as middlemen for companies seeking H-1B workers. Those middlemen include TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant.




Almost 90% of new H-1B hires at those three companies between May 2020 and May 2024 were approved at US consulates. The workers would have cost each of them hundreds of millions more if the fee had been in effect.

More than 93% of new Infosys H-1B hires in that timeframe — upwards of 10,400 workers — would have been hit with the $100,000 fee, the Bloomberg analysis showed, adding up to more than a billion dollars in visa charges.

TCS would have had to pay the fee for 6,500 workers over that period, or 82% of newly approved H-1B workers. Cognizant would be faced with the charge for more than 5,600 employees, or 89% of new H-1B hires.

Even if legal challenges are successful in quickly blocking the fee, industry observers expect it will to lead to a steep drop in visa demand and drive placement of more workers overseas.

Large tech and IT firms have traditionally dominated the H-1B programme, the primary pathway to US careers for foreign workers with at least a bachelor’s degree. They claim most of the 85,000 visa slots available each year.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have claimed that companies use the programme as a cheap alternative to American workers, although H-1B employees must be paid a “prevailing wage” for their industry and early-career H-1B workers typically garner well above the US median wage.

Workers from outside the US, rather than recent international graduates of US colleges already in the country, accounted for more than four out of 10 new H-1B hires approved over the past four years, data analysed by Bloomberg showed.