Free Republic

American President Donald Trump's decision to finally impose a massive 100% tariff — import duty or tax — on movies made outside the US comes as another major blow to India, which has been facing his wrath, with blips of bonhomie, for the past three months and more. -snip- The Indian diaspora in the US spends around $100 million a year to watch Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali and other Indian language movies released in the US country, according to the Producers Guild of India. Indians are about 1.6% of the total US population, with other South Asians also...

Thousands of young Indians have mapped their adult lives with the aim of moving to the US, plans that now lie in tatters. Meghna Gupta* had planned it all – a master’s degree by 23, a few years of working in India, and then a move to the United States before she turned 30 to eventually settle there. So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited to get to the promotion that would...

Several Indian students who secured job offers in the United States have seen their offers withdrawn after US President Donald Trump announced the $1,00,000 H-1B visa policy. Under the new rule, US employers who are looking to sponsor H-1B visas should pay a one-time fee of $1,00,000, which many companies now cite as a reason to back out. Thousands of students, who are currently on F-1 visas, wanted to bag a job in the United States and obtain an H-1B visa. But with the new rules and skyhigh price on the visa, the companies are reluctant to pay the amount,...

Donald Trump's new $100,000 fee on H-1B foreign visas has shattered the dreams of Indian university students hoping to make it big in the United States. -snip- n 2023, nearly three-quarters, approximately 73 percent, of all H-1B workers whose applications were approved were born in India, according to the Pew Research Center. When the White House announced the $100,000 fee last week, students at technical universities across Indian said their hearts broke. 'My dreams were shattered,' Sai Jagruthi, a 17-year-old engineering student at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, told The New York Times. She said her father called her to tell...

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said that there will be a significant number of changes to the H1B visa process before February 2026. This comes ahead of the new one-time USD 100,000 fee for new H1B work visas. Lutnick described the idea of inexpensive tech consultants coming to the US with their families as completely wrong. -snip- In addition to the new fee, the US Department of Labour has launched an initiative called Project Firewall. This enforcement programme aims to protect the rights, wages, and job opportunities of highly skilled American workers. The initiative ensures that employers prioritise qualified...

The U.S. Department of Labor today announced the launch of Project Firewall, an H-1B enforcement initiative that will safeguard the rights, wages, and job opportunities of highly skilled American workers by ensuring employers prioritize qualified Americans when hiring workers and holding employers accountable if they abuse the H-1B visa process. “The Trump Administration is standing by our commitment to end practices that leave Americans in the dust. As we reestablish economic dominance, we must protect our most valuable resource: the American worker. Launching Project Firewall will help us ensure no employers are abusing H-1B visas at the expense of our...

Paridhi Upadhaya was packing her bags after securing a computer science scholarship in the US until headlines of President Donald Trump's H-1B visa crackdown last week prompted her family in Lucknow, India, to scrap the plan. “Trump's unending onslaught against immigrants is forcing us to consider other destinations for her,” the 18-year-old's father Rudar Pratap said. Upadhaya is among thousands of Indians for whom the American dream of world-class education, lucrative careers, better quality of life and social mobility is turning sour due to rising US visa restrictions and policy unpredictability. For decades the H-1B visa has been the gateway...

Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the Trump-Vance campaign called into question claims he previously made about his military service, opening a broadside against the U.S. Navy veteran that some Republicans now liken to “sort of a Swift Boat 2.0 attack.” It is a reference to the highly contentious playbook the GOP used against Sen. John Kerry when the Massachusetts Democrat ran for the White House in 2004, in large part on his record as a junior naval officer in Vietnam. Those character attacks, widely panned at the time, called into...