Indian Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor has strongly criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to impose a substantial $100,000 fee on all new H-1B visa petitions filed after September 21. Tharoor asserts that this move is politically calculated to appeal to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base, who hold anti-immigration sentiments.
In an interview conducted on Monday, September 22, 2025, Tharoor highlighted that the sharp increase in H-1B visa fees is primarily driven by American domestic politics, as Trump aims to garner support from his anti-immigration constituency ahead of the U.S. legislative elections in November. “Again, the motives are principally driven by domestic politics. Trump believes, and the people around him have told him, that the easy H-1B has meant that a lot of Americans who deserve a higher salary from the same companies are being bypassed by Indians who will accept a lower salary,” Tharoor explained.
Tharoor further elaborated on how this policy aligns with the current political climate in the U.S. “Today, the dominant political forces of the so-called MAGA movement are very openly anti-immigrants, and particularly visible immigrants, people of a different color who can be spotted as not of the white ethnic mainstream,” he noted.
The former Union Minister clarified that Trump’s supporters perceive Indian professionals as taking jobs from American workers because they are willing to work for lower salaries. “An Indian techie who comes and works for sixty thousand dollars a year is taking away, according to Trump’s supporters, jobs from an American who would not work for less than eighty-five or ninety thousand dollars a year,” he stated.
According to Tharoor, the exorbitant $100,000 visa fee is designed to render low- and mid-level tech jobs financially unfeasible for foreign workers. “So only the high-end, really desirable, irreplaceable top people who are worth it for a company to spend a hundred thousand dollars, only they will come,” he added.
However, the Congress MP cautioned that this measure could ultimately be detrimental to the U.S. economy. “The obvious solution will be to outsource the job. What used to be done in America can now be done either in multinational company units in Europe or in their global capability centers in India,” he suggested. Tharoor pointed out that this could lead to Indian tech workers performing the same tasks for American firms, but from India rather than the U.S.
Expressing concern for Indian IT companies, Tharoor emphasized that the new fee structure would make many contracts unprofitable. “We cannot pay a hundred thousand dollars per person to go off and do a contract which is actually a low-end contract,” he concluded.