Opinion | US Visa Shock: It's Time India Stopped Playing Nice With Trump's America

Updated: Oct 09, 2026 10:05 am IST Published On Oct 09, 2026 10:05 am IST Last Updated On Oct 09, 2026 10:05 am IST

Published On Oct 09, 2026 10:05 am IST

Last Updated On Oct 09, 2026 10:05 am IST

On Thursday, at a White House briefing, US Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling, with Vice President JD Vance beside him, suspended eight companies from the programme that lets American employers sponsor foreign workers for a green card. Four of them are India's largest IT firms. The announcement came on the day the commander of America's Pacific forces, Admiral Samuel Paparo, ended a six-day visit to Delhi. He came at the end of one of the most substantial US-India land exercises, even as the US Air Force flew F-35 fighters with the Indian Air Force. This raises a question Delhi can no longer avoid. How long can a partnership work when one side seeks India as a security partner but unfairly shuts out Indian engineers seeking better prospects? Should India keep saying yes to the first while it meekly accepts the second?

The programme, known as PERM, is the first step towards an employer-sponsored green card. Before a company can sponsor a foreign employee for permanent residence, it must prove to the Labour Department that it tried and failed to find a qualified American for the job. The Department will now accept no new PERM applications from the eight companies and will not process any already pending. The eight are TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe. No end date has been announced.

READ | Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Among IT Firms Hit By US Green Card Crackdown

On 8 September, the Labour Department's Inspector General had announced on X that Cognizant's filings were suspended, without stating any allegation. In one month, the list has grown to eight, and the announcement has shifted from a social media post to the White House.

The companies will absorb the blow; their employees will feel it more. H-1B visas remain valid, but the route from a temporary work visa to permanent residence is shut. Indians hold about 70 per cent of H-1B visas, so most affected workers are Indian.

The green card queue was already long. Indians in the EB-3 category receive green cards only if they applied before January 2014, and EB-2 is closed to them. In May, the Department of Homeland........

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