The widespread clampdown on employment-linked immigration with the proposed $100,000 fee hike for H-1B visas and a possible removal of the 60-day grace period after layoffs has accelerated the shift of high-quality technology job roles to India.
The shift is already underway, with Big Tech companies and Indian IT firms, which have traditionally relied heavily on offshore staffing models, preparing for the course reversal for sometime now. H-1B applications for FY27 have plunged to a seven-year low, with Indian IT majors registering the sharpest declines, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data.
“Over the past four years, IT companies have systematically reduced their dependence on H 1B visas. The uncertainty of the lottery system, combined with long timelines between the initial application and eventual onsite deployment, has made it difficult for companies to plan their talent requirements around the programme,” said NN Subramanian, chief operating officer at BFSI transformation company Maveric Systems.
USCIS data from May showed H-1B petitions from Infosys falling to 759 in FY27 from 8,886 in FY26. Tata Consultancy Services’ filings dropped to 284 from 5,955 in FY26, while those from HCL America fell to 387 from 3,855.
“The onsite model has been steadily shrinking for IT services and more work is being delivered from India, while onsite teams are becoming smaller and more specialised,” Neeti Sharma, CEO of staffing firm TeamLease Digital, said.
The proposed $100,000-per-petition fee is likely to accelerate that trend, she said, making it harder to justify deploying entry- and mid-level engineers onsite.
Nearshore Models
The change in economics of cross-border talent mobility is also shifting the question from how many employees companies can place onsite to which capabilities genuinely require people to move.
Engineering, AI, data, product, and other technology capabilities that already operate effectively across distributed teams can carry greater ownership from GCCs, while customer-facing roles, regulatory engagement, and functions requiring local-market context will continue to need proximity, said Nilesh Thakker, president of Globalization Excellence at GCC enabler, Zinnov.
“Higher mobility costs therefore sharpen an operating-model decision enterprises were already making: where does proximity create business value, and where can capability travel without the individual having to?” he said.
Leadership Supply Constraints
The H-1B disruption could further strengthen India’s position as a global technology hub, with more than 2,100 GCCs already employing 2.36 million professionals and generating $98.4 billion in revenue.
“Significantly, 44% of GCCs are already at the Portfolio or Transformation Hub stage, with the former owning products, platforms, and intellectual property end-to-end and the latter leading AI-led operations and CXO mandates,” Thakkar said. This means enterprises would not be building capability architecture from scratch; they would be deepening mandates within an ecosystem that already operates at global scale.
“The work itself has moved up the value chain. Expertise-led and frontier work including architecture, research, and AI now accounts for 45% of the average India GCC portfolio, compared with a landscape dominated by execution-oriented work a decade ago,” he added.
The implication is not just more jobs, but better jobs.
“The impact could be positive for Indian hiring, but it is likely to favour specialised and high-value skills rather than volume-based hiring,” Sharma said.
The sentiment going into FY27 clearly reflects this, Anuj Agarwal, founder & CEO at talent advisory firm Zyoin said. More than half of Indian GCCs expect to increase hiring, with around 150,000 new roles projected over the next year. Zyoin expects high-value GCC hiring to grow in the high-teens to low-20% range, outpacing overall GCC headcount growth. “This is a mix shift as much as a headcount increase: more seniority, more specialisation, more ownership of global mandates,” he added.
“Expect demand to keep climbing for specialists in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data engineering, and software development. But the real opportunity here goes beyond cost arbitrage,” Siddhartha Chandurkar, CEO at applied AI firm ShepHertz Technologies said. “India’s IT and business-services industry is already pulling in more than $250 billion a year in revenue, and it’s well-positioned to grow into something bigger — a genuine strategic innovation hub.”
But the availability of talent capable of running a global mandate could constrain this growth. India has only around 10,000-12,000 professionals with the requisite leadership capabilities, against more than 2,000 GCCs, he said. “Supply, not demand or cost, is the real ceiling on FY27,” Agarwal said.
A policy aimed at protecting American jobs could therefore have an unintended consequence: making it more economical for companies to place not just more technology jobs, but increasingly high-value technology mandates, outside the US.