⚠️ Not legal, financial, or immigration advice. Immigration policy is moving weekly. Numbers cited below are as of mid-September 2026 from reported public sources — verify current status on uscis.gov, the Federal Register, and via a licensed US immigration attorney before acting on any specific point.

Two things are happening to Indians abroad at the same time, and most coverage treats them as separate stories.

AI is compressing exactly the kind of work that brought most Indian professionals overseas — entry-level software engineering, application maintenance, testing, business process work, the first four years of a services career.

And the cost of placing a person on that work in the United States has risen by orders of magnitude.

Either alone would be manageable. Together they put pressure on a specific mechanism: the pipeline that recruited engineering graduates in India, trained them, and deployed them onsite to client locations abroad. That pipeline is how a very large share of the Indian diaspora in the US actually got there.

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This is an assessment of what that means — broken down by where you actually stand, because a US citizen of Indian origin, an H-1B holder in year three, a student on OPT and a Gulf-based engineer are facing four different situations.

Part 1: The Pipeline Under Pressure

What changed on the policy side

In September 2025 the US administration introduced a $100,000 payment requirement on certain new H-1B petitions. A US court subsequently struck down the guidance implementing it.

In August 2026 the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $103,265 fee for H-1B petitions subject to the annual cap, including those filed under the 20,000 advanced-degree allocation. It would be paid by the employer at the time of filing, on top of existing H-1B fees. Because it would be due at filing, it could be charged on more than 85,000 petitions — including petitions that are ultimately not approved.

This proposal is not currently in effect. It is a proposed rule, and proposed rules can be modified, delayed or blocked. A separate proposal would change how the lottery allocates visas, nudging employers toward higher-salary roles rather than random selection.

Why this matters specifically to Indians: Indians accounted for approximately 71% of approved H-1B visas in the most recent year reported, and computer-related occupations made up roughly 65% of all approved petitions in FY23.

The positions in the debate, stated plainly. The administration has characterised H-1B as among the most abused visa systems, arguing that higher costs will ensure companies bring in genuinely highly skilled workers rather than cheaper replacements for American workers. Nasscom, representing India's $283 billion IT and BPO industry, has said abrupt implementation disrupts continuity of ongoing onshore projects and affects Indian nationals directly. Both positions are held seriously by serious people, and this article does not adjudicate between them.

What changed on the AI side

The traditional Indian IT model recruited fresh graduates, trained them for several months, and deployed them to client sites to gain experience and provide onsite support.

AI attacks the economics of that model from the other end. The tasks a first-year engineer was deployed to perform are among the most automatable in the industry. When the junior work compresses and the cost of placing a junior abroad rises simultaneously, the case for the whole arrangement weakens.

The higher visa cost strengthens the economic incentive to move work offshore, and Indian IT companies are simultaneously expanding localisation, offshore delivery, automation and AI-led productivity. The key shift is likely to be in where work is performed rather than whether Indian IT companies continue serving US clients.

The numbers already moving

  • TCS reportedly reduced H-1B applications from around 11,212 in FY21 to 7,844 in FY24 — the retreat began well before 2025
  • Amazon's H-1B filings reportedly fell approximately 34% year on year; Meta's and Google's dropped roughly 50%
  • Global job-seeker interest in US roles (measured by clicks on US postings from abroad) reportedly down 29% from August 2023 peak
  • The US contributes as much as 85% of revenue for some Indian IT companies
  • Moody's has assessed that the largest firms could absorb higher costs given strong margins and cash positions, while smaller players face greater pressure

The direction is consistent across all of it: fewer people moving, more work staying where it is.

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Part 2: Where You Actually Stand

The single most important thing to understand is that the exposure is wildly uneven.

If you are a citizen or permanent resident

Your immigration exposure is essentially nil. Nothing in the current proposals touches you. Your exposure is purely occupational — the same AI question every knowledge worker faces, without the additional variable of whether you can remain in the country.

This is worth stating plainly because anxiety spreads through diaspora communities faster than the facts do. If you have status, the visa story is news, not a threat.

If you are on H-1B now

Extensions and transfers are a different category from new cap-subject petitions. The proposed fee as described applies to cap-subject petitions. Confirm your own position with an immigration attorney rather than with a WhatsApp group — this is the single highest-value hour of professional advice available to anyone in this cohort right now.

Your real exposure is employer concentration. A worker whose status depends on one employer, in a function under automation pressure, in a firm under margin pressure, has three correlated risks. Reducing any one of them reduces the compound. See our H-1B 60-Day Grace Period Guide.

If you are in the green card backlog

This is the cohort under the most genuine strain, and it has nothing to do with AI directly. Indian nationals in the employment-based queues face waits measured in decades. That wait was already the central fact of these lives; job market volatility makes an already immobile position more precarious, because changing employers in a backlog carries risk that a citizen simply does not face.

If you are here: understand your priority date, your portability options under AC21, and what happens to your position in different scenarios. Get this from counsel, in writing. See our EB-1 vs EB-2 Backlog and September 2026 Visa Bulletin Analysis.

If you are a student on F-1 or OPT

The hardest entry environment in two decades, for two compounding reasons: entry-level roles are the most exposed to AI, and cap-subject petitions are exactly what the proposed fee targets.

What the data suggests matters: employers weighing a six-figure filing cost will reserve it for roles they cannot fill locally. Generic software engineering is not that. Specialised, scarce capability is.

It also suggests looking wider. The measurable shift of foreign tech worker interest toward alternative destinations is not sentiment; it is people already moving. Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, the Gulf and Singapore all now compete for the same graduates. See our Canada Express Entry and Australia Skilled Migration guides.

If you are in the Gulf

A different situation entirely, and one that rarely gets covered alongside the US story.

Gulf employment is not visa-lottery dependent in the same way, but it is concentrated in sectors — back-office processing, accounting, administration, customer operations — with high automation exposure. The UAE alone accounts for around 18% of India's remittance inflows.

The Gulf question is not "will I be allowed to stay." It is "will this function still exist." See our UAE Golden Visa Guide.

Part 3: The Reverse Flow

For the first time in decades, returning to India is being framed by many professionals as a lateral or upward move rather than a retreat. The Global Capability Centre boom is the reason.

The scale: More than 100 new GCCs are reportedly launching in 2026, with 2.8 million employees projected by 2030 — implying roughly 900,000 net new jobs. Around 80% of newly launched GCCs prioritise AI/ML capabilities at launch, allocating 15-25% of headcount to AI/ML roles within 18 months.

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The money has moved with it. AI/ML salary inflation is reportedly running at 18-25% annually, the highest of any function, and AI-native talent with under five years of experience commands premiums of 40-60% over peers. Bengaluru holds roughly half of India's AI/ML talent pool.

India is not only consuming AI capability but building it. India is the second-largest employer of enterprise AI talent globally, with over 250,000 AI/ML professionals across GCCs — approximately 28% of global GCC AI talent — and leads all GCC markets in AI hiring intensity.

The honest counter-argument

This is contested, and a responsible reading requires both sides.

The optimistic case, argued by India's Chief Economic Adviser among others: GCCs have shifted from low-cost service centres to innovation-driven hubs, are embedded in parent enterprises rather than dependent on external client deal cycles, and therefore face lower AI displacement risk than traditional IT services.

The cautious case, argued by the Observer Research Foundation: AI has emerged as an imminent threat to demand for GCC services, which could directly affect the employment intensity of the sector, with ER&D-led and BPM-led functions the most exposed to displacement pressure. The specific risk named is that if GCCs mainly deploy AI as a cost-saving tool for routine white-collar tasks, and the new tasks created are too few or too senior to absorb affected workers, the result could be a progressive hollowing out of employment even as revenue per employee rises.

ORF's own conclusion is measured: the evidence at present does not support a simple substitution story, and the future of GCCs is not determined solely by AI but co-produced by firm strategy and public policy.

What this means for a returning NRI: the sector is growing and paying well, but the growth is concentrated in AI-adjacent and senior roles. Returning into a routine function is a different proposition from returning into an AI or product mandate. See our NRIs Returning to India — Honest Reality Check.

Part 4: The Money

India is the world's largest recipient of remittances — approximately $120 billion in 2023, with the World Bank projecting $124 billion in 2024 and $129 billion in 2025 — and the largest origin country of emigrants at 18.7 million.

The structural point the World Bank makes is the reassuring one. India's migrant pool is diversified between highly skilled migrants in high-income OECD markets and less-skilled migrants in Gulf markets, which is expected to lend stability to remittance flows in the event of external shocks.

A shock to US tech employment does not hit the whole flow. It hits one segment of a diversified base.

On cost of sending: India's efforts to link UPI with source countries such as the UAE and Singapore are expected to reduce costs and speed up transfers. For households sending regularly, corridor choice is worth reviewing annually — the spread between the cheapest and most expensive route on the same corridor is frequently larger than people assume. See our Sending Money to India 2026 Comparison.

Part 5: What AI Genuinely Improves for NRIs

The disruption coverage crowds this out, and it shouldn't. Several long-standing diaspora problems are getting materially better.

Elder care at a distance. The defining NRI difficulty — a parent ageing in India while the child is eight thousand miles and ten time zones away. Remote monitoring, fall detection, medication reminders, AI-assisted triage and teleconsultation coordination all address a problem that money alone never solved. This is quietly the most consequential improvement on this list.

The grandparent conversation. Real-time translation between a grandmother who speaks only Telugu or Marathi and a grandchild who speaks only English is now workable. Regional-language models have improved to a point where this is a daily tool rather than a demo. For families who had given up on that relationship, it is not a small thing.

Bureaucracy. Indian property documents, succession paperwork, tax filings across two jurisdictions, encumbrance certificates, mutation records — AI does not remove the bureaucracy, but it substantially reduces the cost of understanding it from abroad. NRIs have historically overpaid intermediaries largely because they could not read what they were signing.

Two-country healthcare. Reconciling a parent's Indian prescriptions and reports with a second opinion sought abroad has become dramatically easier.

Language retention for the second generation. Conversational practice in a heritage language, on demand, without a class. Whether this works is still open — but it is the first tool that fits how diaspora children actually live.

Part 6: The Frauds Aimed Specifically at You

This section matters more than any other on this page, and almost nobody is writing it.

NRI families are close to an ideal target for AI-enabled fraud, for structural reasons:

  • An elderly parent in India, alone or with limited support
  • An adult child abroad, in a different time zone, hard to reach quickly
  • A relationship where the parent would not question an urgent call from their child
  • Significant assets — property, deposits, gold — and the ability to move money fast
  • A pre-existing habit of the child sending money at short notice

Voice cloning

A short sample of a person's voice is now sufficient to clone it convincingly. Social media, wedding videos, voice notes in family WhatsApp groups — the material is already public.

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The script is consistent: a parent in India receives a call in their child's voice. There has been an accident, an arrest, a detention at an airport, a medical emergency. Money is needed immediately. Do not tell anyone. There is no time.

The time zone is the weapon. The parent calls the child back, it is 3 am where the child is, the phone is on silent, and the twenty minutes of unanswered calls is exactly the window the fraud needs.

The countermeasure: a family verification word

⭐ Set this up this week. It is the highest-return action in this article.

Agree a word or question with your parents now. Not a birthday, not a pet's name, not anything that appears anywhere online. Something arbitrary that only your family knows.

Instruct your parents explicitly:

  • Any urgent call asking for money gets the question, every time, without exception
  • If the caller deflects, pressures, or says there is no time — that is the fraud, and hang up
  • No legitimate emergency is ever harmed by a two-minute callback on a known number
  • Being told "don't tell anyone" is itself the signal

Then practise it once, so it is not novel under stress. Parents who have rehearsed a verification step use it. Parents who have only been told about it freeze.

Document and identity fraud on property

NRI-owned property in India was already among the most litigated asset classes in the country, and the vulnerability is structural: an absentee owner who cannot inspect, cannot appear, and relies on documents sent from a distance.

AI raises the ceiling on forgery. Fabricated documents, synthetic identities and manipulated video for remote verification are all cheaper than they were.

What actually protects you: a trusted person who physically visits the property, periodic verification of records through official channels, a properly drafted and current power of attorney, and — critically — never approving a transaction on the basis of documents or video alone.

Investment and relationship fraud

Diaspora-targeted investment schemes have always traded on community trust — a fellow Telugu, a fellow Gujarati, a temple connection. AI makes the persona cheaper to build and the personalisation deeper.

The oldest test still works: anyone who requires urgency and secrecy together is running a fraud. Every time.

Part 7: What to Tell the Second Generation

Parents ask this constantly and the honest answer is uncomfortable: nobody knows which specific careers are safe, and anyone who tells you confidently is guessing.

What the current evidence does support:

  • The premium has moved from credential to capability. AI-native talent with under five years of experience commanding 40-60% premiums over peers is an explicit market signal that recent, demonstrable capability is outbidding tenure.
  • Physical and licensed work is differently exposed. Medicine, dentistry, skilled trades, and regulated professions face automation pressure on components rather than on the whole role.
  • The exposed middle is the risk. Routine white-collar processing work that requires a degree but not judgement is where both the AI pressure and the offshoring pressure land.
  • Geographic optionality is itself an asset. A second generation holding a Western passport and Indian family ties has more moves available than either of their grandparents did. That is worth cultivating consciously.

What not to do: push a child into a field purely on a five-year safety forecast. The forecasts have been wrong repeatedly and in both directions.

What to Actually Do

  • If you hold citizenship or permanent residency: ignore the visa noise, attend to the occupational question.
  • If you are on H-1B: one hour with an immigration attorney on your specific category. Reduce employer concentration risk where you can.
  • If you are in the green card backlog: know your priority date and your portability position, in writing, from counsel.
  • If you are a student: specialise into scarcity, and evaluate more than one country seriously.
  • If you are in the Gulf: assess your function's automation exposure rather than your visa status.
  • Everyone, this week: set up the family verification word with your parents. It takes five minutes and it is the highest-return action on this page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the $103,265 H-1B fee in effect?

No. It is a proposal from DHS for cap-subject petitions, announced in August 2026, and is not yet in effect. An earlier $100,000 payment requirement from September 2025 had its implementing guidance struck down by a US court. Verify current status at uscis.gov + Federal Register + via a licensed US immigration attorney.

Does the proposed fee apply to H-1B extensions?

The proposal as described applies to cap-subject petitions. Extensions and transfers are a different category. Confirm your specific situation with an immigration attorney.

Will AI end the Indian IT services model?

Analysts broadly expect a shift rather than an ending. The likely change is in where work is performed rather than whether Indian firms continue to serve US clients. Localisation, offshore delivery, automation and AI-led productivity are all expanding simultaneously.

Are GCC jobs in India safe from AI?

Contested. India's Chief Economic Adviser argues GCCs face lower risk given their shift toward innovation mandates; the Observer Research Foundation warns of possible hollowing out in ER&D and BPM functions. ORF's own view is that present evidence does not support a simple substitution story.

Should I move back to India?

The GCC market is growing and paying well, but growth is concentrated in AI-adjacent and senior roles. Returning into a routine function is a materially different proposition from returning into an AI or product mandate. See our returning-to-India settling guide for the full RNOR + tax + logistics framework.

Will remittances to India fall?

The World Bank notes that India's migrant pool is diversified between skilled workers in OECD markets and less-skilled workers in the Gulf, which is expected to lend stability in the event of external shocks. A US tech shock affects one segment, not the whole flow.

How do I protect my parents from AI voice-cloning scams?

Agree a verification word that appears nowhere online, instruct them to use it on every urgent money request without exception, and rehearse it once so it is familiar under stress. If a caller claiming to be their child (or another relative) says "don't tell anyone" or "no time" — that is the fraud, and they should hang up + call back on a known number.

What should my children study given AI disruption?

Nobody can answer this reliably. The evidence supports demonstrable capability over credentials, and suggests the exposed zone is routine white-collar work that requires a degree but not judgement. Physical and licensed work (medicine, dentistry, skilled trades) faces automation pressure on components rather than the whole role.

Disclaimer: NRI Globe provides journalism and general information only. Not legal, financial, or immigration advice. Immigration policy is fact-specific and changes frequently — consult a licensed US immigration attorney. Stock market + remittance decisions involve risk; consult a licensed financial advisor. Numbers cited are from reported public sources as of mid-September 2026; verify current status before acting.