The US government is reportedly weighing $100,000 fee on foreign students who want to work after graduating. For a generation of Indian engineers already impacted by September’s H-1B hike, the American dream appears to be slipping further away. For years, the promise was simple: get into a good American university, work hard, land a job and the rest would eventually follow. That promise is now looking shakier than it has in decades.
What is actually being proposed for foreign students and hopeful engineers
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is weighing a $100,000 fee on international students who want to work in the US after they graduate. The fee would attach to Optional Practical Training, or OPT, which is the program that lets international graduates work in the US for one to three years on their student visa, often as the first real step toward a longer-term career and eventual H-1B sponsorship.Data shows that roughly 419,000 people were working under OPT in 2024. If this fee is enacted, most of them and those hoping to follow in their footsteps would be pricing themselves out of that option entirely. A DHS spokeswoman said no policy should be considered final until formally announced, but the direction of travel is hard to miss.
$100,000 fee is not a standalone move
To understand why this lands hard, let us rewind to September. Last year, President Trump signed an order imposing a $100,000 annual fee on companies sponsoring H-1B visas – the visa category that lets skilled foreign workers stay in the US long-term. That fee alone marked a jump of more than 10,000% from what companies used to pay (a combined $995 in lottery and petition fees). The scale of that increase sent tech and finance firms into a scramble: Microsoft, JPMorgan and Amazon all sent internal emails urging H-1B holders to stay in the US or return immediately before the new rule kicked in at midnight on September 20, with one law firm advising JPMorgan staff to avoid international travel entirely until the government offered clearer guidance.The two fees target different stages of the same pipeline. The H-1B fee hit people already employed and sponsored. The proposed OPT fee would hit the stage before that to new graduates who haven’t even gotten a job offer yet, let alone sponsorship.
Why Indian students and freshers are exposed
The numbers make clear who absorbs most of this. Citing government data, news agency Reuters reported in September that Indians accounted for 71% of all approved H-1B visas last year, with China a distant second at 11.7%. Companies like Amazon (over 12,000 H-1B approvals in the first half of 2025), along with Microsoft and Meta (over 5,000 each), lean heavily on this talent pipeline.For a student who has already spent years and often a family’s life savings on a US degree, betting on OPT, a $100,000 price tag before they’ve even earned their first paycheque changes the math completely. Recent graduates and early-career engineers in more routine technical roles are the most exposed — the ones without years of specialised experience to justify a company absorbing that cost. Meanwhile, with $100,000 H1-B fees, startups and smaller firms, which have long been an entry point for younger international talent, may simply stop sponsoring altogether. What’s left standing is a narrower path that only senior engineers, researchers and highly specialised professionals can realistically walk through.
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