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

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?

What Has Been Done

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.

Who Pays The Price

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 Security said it would grant green cards to applicants already in the US only in "extraordinary circumstances". A worker whose PERM application is now frozen loses years she cannot recover.

There is a further risk. American law lets an H-1B worker stay beyond the six-year limit if her labour certification has been pending for a year or more. If the Department moves from suspending applications to rejecting them, people who have lived in America for a decade could lose the legal basis to remain. This is blatantly cruel.

Fraud Or politics?

Why has Washington done this? The stated reason is fraud. Vance said nearly 1,000 of Microsoft's 3,682 PERM applications were for jobs from which American workers had been laid off. He claimed that workers hired through outsourcing firms earn about $48,000 less than comparable Americans. The outsourcing firms have paid visa settlements before. If a company certified that no American was available for a job an American had just lost, that is fraud, and Delhi should not defend it. So far, however, no specific charge has been made public against the four Indian firms.

READ | "Indentured Servants": Vance On Microsoft Hiring Foreign Workers Under H-1B

The manner of action, however, points to politics. Normal enforcement investigates first and penalises after it finds wrongdoing. Here, pending applications were frozen before any finding, and the Vice President made the announcement four weeks before the midterm elections of 3 November. Placing Microsoft on the list lets the administration present this as a fight against Big Tech and answer any charge of targeting Indians. Doubts about outsourcing also cross party lines. Senators Dick Durbin (Democrat) and Chuck Grassley (Republican) spent more than a decade drafting bills to curb it.

India has many friends in American politics and very few who would pay a price for, making it strategically essential and politically disposable. Disposable means that no American voting group loses anything when India is hurt, so a small, determined group of opponents can turn Indian workers into a political symbol at no cost to itself.

Two Tracks, One Partner

Meanwhile, the security relationship keeps moving forward. In Delhi, Paparo met the service chiefs and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. In August, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and US Under Secretary Allison Hooker advanced the Indian Ocean Strategic Venture, which covers maritime security, undersea cables, and strategic infrastructure.

How can both pathways move together? The Pentagon wants Indian naval strength in an ocean where America is stretched. The White House answers to voters who see foreign workers as a threat. The National Security Council once balanced these decisions. That machinery was weakened in 2025, and nobody now asks how a PERM freeze affects a defence partnership. India keeps separate tracks too, but it separates countries. America is separating its interest in India from its treatment of Indians.

Delhi Loses Patience

Delhi has stopped hiding its irritation. In New York on 28 September, Jaishankar said countries "should not be so self-centred", faulted America's understanding of India's concerns on terrorism, and said, "the economics of mobility and the politics of mobility are at odds". On 5 October, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said trade talks had reached a "plateau" and that tariffs had been "weaponised", with a new American law allowing 100 per cent tariffs on buyers of Russian oil due within weeks. Part of this tone is for voters at home.

READ | US Bars Tata, HCL, Infosys Among 8 IT Firms From Green Card Filing. What It Means For Indians

What does all this mean? The more serious damage is to public opinion, on both sides. Pew's 2026 survey found that Indian favourable views of the US fell from 54 per cent to 45 per cent in a year, while, for the first time since 2008, more Americans view India unfavourably than favourably. Students, engineers and the diaspora once held this relationship steady. A partnership that rests on governments alone is narrower and more transactional, and Delhi will find it harder to explain defence ties to its own voters.

How Long Can This Last?

How long can such a divided strategy work? It depends on a Washington calculation that India needs America against China more than America needs India. Washington feels India will absorb any cost on trade and visa costs and still cooperate militarily. There is truth to this, but every blow India takes without retaliation only tells Washington that India will take the next one quietly, too.

Why should India accept this? It should not. In 2003 the Vajpayee government refused to send troops to Iraq, and two years later Washington signed the civil nuclear agreement. Leverage, the ability to make the other side pay for what it wants, decides outcomes. China used its leverage over rare-earth exports, and Washington pulled back its tariffs within months. India, having used none, absorbed the penalty for half a year.

Where India Should Push Back

The real question, then, is where to push back. India must separate two kinds of cooperation. The first is what India does for itself, such as tracking the Chinese navy and training with a more capable force. Cutting that would hurt India first. The second is what India does mainly for America: opening its shipyards to American warships, stretching its navy into the western Indian Ocean, buying American weapons, cutting Russian oil, and opening its farm markets. On these, America is the one asking, and this is where India's leverage lies.

The price should be extracted subtly. Jaishankar's words have made India's displeasure clear, but they have changed nothing in Washington. Leverage works through action and in private. Delhi can slow the next large defence purchase, let the Indian Ocean projects move at India's pace, and tell American officials that Indian help will follow how Indians are treated in America. The Pentagon cannot keep expecting cooperation from India while the White House is busy punishing Indians.

READ | Explained: What Is PERM Programme And Why Team Trump Is Suspending It

India faces some risk in this. The White House can escalate with tariffs. It has also shown it will turn to Pakistan when Delhi seems difficult. India must choose its pressure points with care. Yet a partner that absorbs every blow teaches the other side that blows are free.

Two things follow for Delhi. It should speak up for Indian workers and let firms answer for their own conduct. It should also stop expecting Washington to weigh Indian public anger, which no American voter feels, and instead give Washington something it will feel: a slower, costlier India on the things America wants.

America may be becoming more important to India's security at the very moment it is becoming less welcome to Indians. A partnership divided this way can survive for a while, but it cannot thrive on these terms. If Washington wants India's sailors, it will have to make room for India's engineers.

(The author is a Research Fellow in the Geostrategy Program at the Takshashila Institution)