Restrictions on skilled-worker mobility threaten India's services-led growth model. Analyse with reference to recent U.S. visa and labour-certification measures.

Services make up about 55% of India's Gross Value Added [1]. A large part of that growth comes from IT-services exports, and those exports depend on sending skilled professionals to work at clients' sites abroad. Recent U.S. curbs on this mobility therefore hit a structural pillar of India's growth. The threat is serious, but it is not fatal.

Recent U.S. measures

• $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions (Proclamation, September 2025). It was extended to September 2027, although a U.S. court vacated the guidance implementing it in June 2026 [2].
• PERM suspensions: The Department of Labor suspended permanent labour certification, a step in the employer-sponsored green-card process. It first did so for Cloudera in May 2026 [3], then in October 2026 for eight employers, including Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL [4].

How the threat works

• Concentration risk: India-born workers received about 79% of continuing-employment H-1B approvals in FY2024 [5]. A single executive decision by one country can therefore disrupt the onsite delivery model.
• Remittances: The U.S. is now the largest source of India's remittances (27.7% in 2023-24) [6]. Fewer visas and frozen green cards reduce household incomes and weaken support for the current account.
• Costs and competitiveness: Higher visa fees and uncertain permanent residency raise project costs, so Indian firms lose bids to rivals that hire locally in the U.S.
• No reciprocal lever: Visa rules are a U.S. domestic matter. India has no treaty right and no equivalent measure to use in response.

Limits to the threat

• Offshoring cushions the impact: The government projects about 2,400 Global Capability Centres (GCCs), 2.8 million jobs and $105 billion by 2030 [7]. More of the work moves to India instead of Indian workers moving to the U.S.
• Caveat: Most GCCs belong to foreign companies. India gains the jobs, but the patents and profits largely go abroad.
• Legal checks: The U.S. courts' scrutiny of the H-1B fee shows these curbs are contested even inside the U.S. [2].

Overall, the U.S. measures expose how much India's services model depends on one country's labour market. They push the model away from sending workers abroad and towards delivering the work from India. India should secure a services-and-mobility chapter in the India–U.S. trade talks, sign mobility pacts with other partners, and move domestic GCCs towards owning intellectual property. Done together, these steps would make services growth more resilient and advance SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth).