For millions of Indians, the road to the ultimate career aspiration had a familiar script - an engineering degree to get a tech services job, then a posting in the US, repeated visa renewals and then the green card that gave them permanent residency in the country. Earlier this month, the US announced it would suspend eight technology firms, including Microsoft, India's Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCL Technologies, from hiring skilled international workers on a permanent basis through a widely used visa pathway. New and pending applications under the Permanent Labor Certification Program, or PERM, have been frozen.
This is a big blow to Indians who hold a majority of H-1B visas - a temporary visa for specialists - which they used to work in the US while relying on PERM to get a green card and, ultimately, citizenship. The latest announcement is in line with Trump's push for stricter skilled-worker immigration rules, which tech firms have been adapting to and, therefore, the impact on businesses may be minimal, experts say. Nasscom, the trade association of India's $300bn (£226bn) technology industry, says that Indian companies have reduced the dependence on H-1B visas and are hiring more locally.
"Consequently, the number of employees transitioning from H-1B visas to permanent residency through the PERM process is also relatively limited," the association adds. Wipro said in a statement that more than 80% of its workforce in the US is locally hired. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said its PERM applications were in single digits in the last two years.
Microsoft said in a statement that it has filed for H-1B visas mostly to retain existing staff, not to import new workers. A report in Business Standard newspaper, citing PERM Tracker, said, TCS' applications filings fell to two in 2025-26 from 513 in the previous year and 1,804 in the year before that. The report said no records were found for Infosys and Wipro for 2025-26.
BBC's email to all eight companies asking questions about the impact of the restriction and how they were supporting affected employees in the US remained unanswered. Brokerage firm HDFC Securities said the impact on tech firms would be minimal, as PERM-linked jobs make up only a small share of revenue, even if higher-paid American workers replace them. But the US government's decision has an impact beyond business.
A US-based senior executive with one of these eight firms told the BBC on condition of anonymity that the new PERM restriction will "not break the business", but the impact is more "intense" at a human level. "A good number of people we know are stuck in a space where they have spent some years in the US but their green card application hasn't moved. Even if they are ready to move back to India, their children don't want to because they grew up here," he said.
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