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The US visa could now come with a big price tag.
$100,000 a year for H-1B visas.
They should know that Indians and Chinese, they provide the best workforce.
That exemption is critical if we're going to meet the needs of healthcare.
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm David Harper, and whether you're someone looking to work in the US or you're an American company looking to hire, we're rounding up what we know so far and what it might mean, and also coming up how tax changes in India could reduce household bills there.
And when does a wedding party become too excessive?
The government in Uzbekistan have their own opinions.
So, not for the first time, an announcement by Donald Trump has upended the status quo.
On Friday, the US President announced that H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers would now come with a fee of 100000.
The country would rather not have to pay $100,000.
How do you do that?
You hire Americans.
So there's an incentive to hire Americans.
But there may be instances where it's better off doing it through expertise or whatever it may be.
Panic kicked in, with some people speculating about the details of the change and some worrying it would cost them an eye-watering sum to travel home and return to the US.
It was later clarified it was a one-off fee that applied only to new applicants.
Even so though, it's brought unwelcome uncertainty to many people, a large number of them working in the tech sector and, according to the most recent figures, more than 70 of them from India.
Is the reaction of one Indian student from Delhi School of Economics.
Of course, shatter the dreams of Indians.
Americans also don't realize that it's worth the immigrants who made America great.
And when it comes to providing services, they should know that Indians and Chinese let's say the Asians they provide the best workforce.
I don't know why Indians are targeting only the US.
They should go to other countries also as well, right?
And it's also raised some heartbeats in the medical sector, given that a significant percentage of US doctors are from abroad.
Today, we've heard some hints that doctors may be made exempt for the confusing matters.
More on that in a moment.
But Roman Zelichenko is a former immigration lawyer and the co-founder of Labourless, who provide electronic solutions to manage the visa application process.
Our labor department continues to publish statistics about how many job openings there are and will continue to be in the coming years, versus how many folks in the US can fill those roles.
And there's always a gap.
Right.
And so the idea behind the H-1B visa is to close that gap.
We're bringing in talent that are studying computer science, various types of engineering jobs, you know, biomedical stuff et cetera, as well as other specialties, of course.
But yeah, for the tech sector specifically, it's a really important visa for companies.
And we're talking, you know, Fortune 100.
So you've got your Googles, your Amazons, your Teslas, you know, your Metas, et cetera, as well as consulting companies like IBM and other companies that are, many of whom are based in India but have huge operations in the US.
We're still getting updates as to what this is likely to mean.
There's a lot of uncertainty about it.
But to look at what will happen next in terms of hiring companies.
If there's a significant cost like this attached to bringing someone in on one of these visas, it presumably means they're only going to pay it if they absolutely have to.
Well, that's the irony here.
We have visas in the US that are not the H-1B visa, that are typically reserved for people who are at the very top of their field.
So one example is an O-1 visa for individuals of extraordinary ability.
And there are direct green card paths or permanent residency paths to the US as well.
And the reason I'm bringing that up is if companies are making a decision, you know as to who to hire on an H1B visa.
And there's now an additional on top of salary, on top of legal fees and all the other stuff, there's an additional 100000 fee, which is, I mean, leagues beyond what any other visa fee you know is today.
They would probably reserve that visa and that you know cost to the company for people of extraordinary skill and ability.
And the irony is we already have other and alternative visa paths for them.
So, yeah, absolutely.
It's a huge cost.
And it would probably mean that you know they'll reserve it for for folks who they can afford that for.
But for the most part honestly, outside of the really large, you know, multibillion dollar companies, there are tons of small and midsize businesses that hire individuals on H-1B visas every year.
And you know I can't speak for them individually, but I would imagine that most of them just simply would not be able to afford this.
I mean, period.
Yeah.
So in the short to medium term, it's sort of put things on hold.
Potentially, yes.
I mean.
So the changes for this fee proposal as of Sunday, as of yesterday, are that it is now no longer an annual fee.
It is a one-time fee.
It does not affect any current H-1B visa holder, so only anybody who applies after yesterday.
But for the most part our H-1B season, if you will, where most of the applications come in is in the early spring, you know, late spring into early summer.
So I think, yes, certain things have been put on hold.
It's also not peak season right now.
And so, you know, I suspect that this hold isn't turning places upside down.
It's just sort of hopefully pausing things for maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months, but hopefully not for too much longer than that.
You've worked in this area for a long time in various forms.
What's your prediction as to what we might see, not just in relation to this, but the whole sphere of visas and immigration, over the next few years?
Well, with respect to employment-based immigration, I think it's a political hot potato.
And I think with the H-1B visa fee there will be litigation and I suspect there will be impacts of that litigation.
In the first Trump administration, they also attacked the H-1B visa to show that they're trying to do something to the voters or the voting base for the administration, but not much came out of it.
Roman Zelichenko there, former immigration lawyer who works extensively with these type of visas.
And we heard Roman talk about the significance in the tech industry specifically there.
But there is also potentially going to be an impact on the medical sector.
So much so that the White House later said doctors might qualify for an exemption.
The high fee could be waived if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines that the hiring of these workers is in the national interest.
Dr Bobby Mukamala is the president of the American Medical Association and I asked him if this 100000 price tag is going to cut off the flow of foreign doctors in the US.
And the background is that we are short on physicians in this country.
A projected shortfall of 86,000 physicians just within the next decade.
And that number keeps going up.
And our goal is to keep our country healthier.
And the critical aspect of that is make sure that every patient has a relationship with a physician.
That is going to be long term as opposed to people burning out and leaving.
And so you know, 25 percent of the workforce in this country, the physician workforce, are international medical graduates.
And I live in a city called Flint, Michigan.
And this is.
This is basically post-industrial United States, where General Motors has shrunk by 90 percent.
And we have a population and a destination that isn't necessarily at the top of the list for medical graduates from the US, And so we've depended on international medical graduates to take care of our community for decades.
In fact, my parents immigrated here from India in 1970 to work at Hurley Hospital, the same hospital where I operate now, which is dependent on international medical graduates.
Some of them are lucky enough to get what's called a J-1 visa waiver, but many are depending on an H-1B visa.
And that's something that...
It never used to cost $100,000.
And if that's the potential outcome of this and I think it's still a little bit unclear whether there'll be an exemption, but I would say that exemption is critical if we're going to meet the needs of healthcare in places like Flint Michigan.
What some of President Trump's supporters would argue is that America should be training their own doctors.
It should be Americans filling these roles, not bringing in people from abroad.
Is that practical?
It's practical as a goal.
But when is that going to happen?
And what's going to make people want to come to a place like Flint Michigan instead of Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago?
Right.
I mean, we kind of know.
When there is a massive debt associated with going to medical school in this country, from a quarter million dollars to three hundred some thousand dollars.
And then the way that that's thought about is where can I go to practice where I won't be in debt for my entire career and can pay it off sooner?
And the next thought is naturally, well, it's unlikely to be a place like Flint, Michigan.
Right.
And so what does that do to a community like this, to communities like this in rural areas across the country?
And there's many statistics that we have that show that IMGs international medical graduates that depend on things like an H-1B visa are the ones that are likely to go to rural areas to serve those communities.
And so that's what I would say is that we would love to have those filled by U.S. graduates.
But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
And are we going to be happy when the mortality goes up and chronic disease goes up in communities that no longer have physicians to help take care of them?
More recently, we've heard from the White House that there might be an exemption for doctors.
We still don't really know how this would work.
But aside from doctors elsewhere in the industry nurses, other medical professionals should they also have an exemption?
Yeah.
I mean, we want a healthier country and we've kind of stagnated with that.
You know, life expectancy kind of leveled out.
There's a lot of things that physicians want to see with the health of our country that is dependent on more than physicians.
Right.
We need team based care.
We need to be able to work with nurses to be able to take care of our patients.
Everybody has a role to play.
That's Dr. Bobby Mukamala, the President of the American Medical Association.
I'm joined for World Business Report today by Peter Jankowski, Vice President of Research and Analysis at Arbor Financial Services in Chicago.
Thank you very much for joining us here on the program, Peter.
This is quite an interesting topic to talk about.
We've heard criticism from potential workers, criticism from people who might be hiring.
Is there anybody really that benefits from this?
Well, I know that technology companies have certainly complained about the small number of H-1B visas that are available, that they oftentimes are restricted more by the fact that simply, the visas aren't available at all.
So technology companies might well be in favor of this, and they certainly do have President Trump's ear as well.
So it's possible that they might have even suggested it at some point, or at least have had it discussed with them.
I also think that perhaps for some of the smaller communities are looking for doctors.
And my understanding is that in some of those smaller communities they actually help out doctors with the cost of medical school, with the promise that you know they'll serve the community for five years.
And, given the high cost of medical school, paying 100000 for a visa for a doctor to come in might actually be a benefit to some of those smaller communities in that regard.
Interesting to look at some of the details.
We'll be back with you in a little while, Peter.
But for a moment, we were talking about the impact of this on India.
Let's go and look at India again, because from today, Indians will find a host of products, from everyday essentials like milk and medicines to cars and TVs getting cheaper today.
It's because of a sweeping overhaul of India's goods and services tax, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has cut four different tax rates down to two.
And it's a move to simplify the tax code and revive household spending at a time when US tariffs threaten to slow growth in Asia's third largest economy.
The BBC's Archana Shukla reports from Mumbai on how the markets and shoppers are responding to the tax cuts, just as the festive season begins there.
Narrow, crowded lanes, glittering lights.
The din of shoppers haggling over clothes and jewellery.
Mumbai's Crawford market is in full festive swing.
And there's reason to cheer.
New tax cuts are expected to draw in a lot more shoppers like Varsha.
If the tax bill comes down, so automatically our pocket will allow to spend some more.
The markets are already preparing.
It's the start of the biggest festive season.
And with tax cuts across hundreds of product categories, from clothes to shampoos, sweets to even cars and motorcycles, the hope is that millions more people will come out shopping and it will keep the economy rolling.
The government hopes it could also absorb some of the impact of the U.S. trade tariffs.
Small cars and motorbikes, often seen as a gauge of the broader economy, are now 10% cheaper.
And automakers are betting this will rev up slow sales.
At the showroom of Hero Motor Corp, the largest two-wheeler brand, buyers are already trickling in.
Many are still making inquiries and comparing prices.
But Hero's Mumbai regional head Sachin Ghanawat tells me sales could jump 25%.
We are telling customers to pre-book so that they'll get their desired model on time.
New model has come into the hero and I've seen the reviews also.
I met Vishal Pawar here too.
He wants to upgrade his motorbike and feels now is the right time.
It's of course beneficial.
I think 10% discount is much better if you buy on the festival seasons.
It's this consumer confidence that the government hopes will keep the economy rolling amidst falling exports and US trade tariffs.
I'm paying a lot of tax here which I don't know in the long run, even if I'm getting benefit out of it.
But not everyone's jumping in just yet.
Muskan, who runs a small clothing brand, says she's waiting to watch how the tax cuts play out.
I'm hopeful that it works as per plan.
If it does, of course, it's going to be beneficial for all of us.
But this isn't just about city shoppers.
Companies have their eyes set on the smaller, price-sensitive towns and villages where two-thirds of India lives.
We are preparing for the 22nd.
This is what Sabhisachi Gupta tells me.
He heads the air conditioners division at Godrej Appliances, one of India's biggest consumer goods companies.
In the metropolitan cities, there the affordability is more.
The next-rung cities, the more the rural sub-rural, the GST cut will have a much bigger impact there.
Gap between affordability and ambition will now reduce.
That's the cheer for another car sold at the dealership.
But experts say these festive sales will only cushion some of the global trade shocks.
Whether India's economy can sustain its pace will depend on how much of these savings trickle down and how long the spending continues.
Archana Shukla, BBC News, Mumbai.
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And you are with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now, Peter Jankowskis is still with us.
Let's talk about AI for a moment, because we've heard of this investment NVIDIA investing in OpenAI quite a significant chunk of money.
And these are arguably two of the biggest names in AI development.
Indeed, it's a very powerful combination.
It'll be interesting to see what sort of objections are raised, either by the FTC or some other bodies, to this conglomeration.
But it does solve a problem, I think, for both of them in that OpenAI in general is burning cash.
So a cash infusion is quite welcome.
And certainly...
It supports the demand for NVIDIA's chips.
NVIDIA itself was up very strongly today on this report.
It was up almost 4% on the news.
And, in fact, it's the deal that works both ways, because as part of this we understand OpenAI are going to buy millions of AI processors from NVIDIA.
Yes, that's correct.
Yes.
So it definitely is beneficial to both of them.
It's a question though, as to how authorities will look at it in terms of the competitive landscape in the AI space.
Yeah.
And also, as we see, other markets around the world, other companies trying to get in on that growing AI space.
People watching this with great interest.
Indeed, indeed.
And as I say, OpenAI kind of is the leader.
But to sustain that lead they definitely are in need of continual cash infusions and the chips obviously, that are there.
Sam Altman has already struck a strong deal with SoftBank to encourage that.
And certainly this deal is just another leg in that process.
Definitely one to keep an eye on.
Right now, though, let's take a moment to celebrate the happy couple.
Some sounds there from a rather glamorous wedding in Uzbekistan.
And despite curbs brought in by the government a few years ago, there has been no let-up on the amount of money spent on some incredibly lavish celebrations taking place in the country.
Only last year the president there criticised shameless spending on feasts, which can cost 20000 in a country where the monthly income is rarely above 300.
Ferdav Zavkiev is a reporter for BBC Uzbek in the capital Tashkent.
It's not only a traditional event here in a spec family.
It's also a sign of wealth and privilege in the society.
It's truly quite expensive.
People invite at least 1000 or 1500 guests to their weddings and they invite some guests outstanding and famous singers.
They do shows in the weddings.
So many of them take debts to make weddings kind of famous, to make their weddings look expensive.
What the government is trying to do now is putting some restrictions to the number of guests at the weddings.
How much are people spending on these weddings, comparative to what people earn in Uzbekistan?
Here in Uzbekistan, The average salary is around 400 or 500 US dollars over the republic.
But per wedding, I would say it will be around at least 40 or 50 thousand dollars.
Wow, that's a lot.
Yes, that's truly a lot.
I know that some people save money for wedding for five years, for six years.
We know that this is something the government in Uzbekistan has been looking at intently.
We've seen reports from a few years ago of the government intervening on some restrictions on what people do with some of these lavish.
Why does the government feel that they need to get involved in this?
The government is trying to teach.
Can they at least financial awareness and how to spend their money to the people?
I think the government feeling insecure that the people are spending their savings, their money, their salaries on just fun or entertainment and it's also just some traditional event for the privilege saying the government put the restrictions a few years ago as well, but you know it nearly didn't work, so this presumably isn't going to go down well with people who are still going to want their their big party.
Among the people there is also some group of young people.
They are also so against this traditional event.
And they also do have some music groups, some, you know, blogs and something like that.
Activists.
They're all against this project and the pro-village events, but still, they are still trying to do and they are breaking the rule.
It's nearly out of the control of the government.
Also, the government is still trying to make and to handle these events, but it is impossible.
For Dav Zavkiev, our reporter filling me in on the finer points of Uzbek weddings.
Well, Nikita Bolchandani-Morgan is the managing director of a wedding venue called Meridian Grand, and they're based in London, but they specialise in weddings for people from all manner of backgrounds right across the world.
You see every end of the spectrum when you're in this business.
You see people to whom budget is everything and they will come in here and they'll have a set budget in mind and they will not spend a penny over that budget.
We do weekday weddings.
If you look at our calendar in September, we've got 34 weddings this month alone.
So it is busy.
People are doing weddings every day of the week.
Just talking a little bit about some of the cultural differences, because in some parts of the world we like to spend quite a bit on a wedding, but not maybe over the top.
And in other areas, it's a massive thing.
People will put everything they have into it.
What makes some people sort of go for something more lavish than others maybe?
I think a lot of it comes down to community expectations.
And particularly when we opened this venue back in 2015, when I was sort of launched into this sphere of weddings, we saw people, letters from banks where clients had taken out loans and they were writing to us to confirm is this person legitimately booked at your wedding?
Because they've asked us for a bank loan.
So the bank's doing their checks.
One of the things that we've heard the fears from the Uzbek government is that people are spending a lot of money that they can't really afford.
That's not unrealistic.
No, it's not unrealistic.
I've heard of people sacrificing two, three years of family holidays just to put money into the wedding pot.
I think, though, that things have changed and we've seen that change post-COVID.
So where, back in the day, people would invite literally everyone that they knew within the community?
I think the post-COVID people have become a lot more selective and the trend has changed there.
We do a lot of Asian weddings, you know, Pakistani weddings, Bengali weddings, Indian weddings and even a lot of African weddings.
And I think we've seen that drop in numbers.
You know where we saw the averages at 600, 650.
They have come down to sort of 350 to 400 guests.
So it is becoming a lot more intimate.
I hesitate to ask this question, but are some cultures notorious for spending a lot of money and having a lot of people?
Are there any that beat anyone else?
I think that you see excess in every single community.
I think that it's not community specific.
You're always going to get the high end weddings in every single culture.
With some of the communities that we deal with, we do see this trend of people trying to outdo each other.
Yeah.
So you know, my neighbour had their son's wedding last week and we want our wedding to be better than that wedding.
I'm sure that exists in pretty much every country in the world.
Nikita Mulchandani, Morgan Managing Director of Meridian Grand Wedding Venue in London.
Just want to bring you something that's come to us in the last few hours, because Disney has now said that Jimmy Kimmel's late night show will be resuming on Tuesday.
The show was suspended after comments Kimmel made about the death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
It's a statement the company put out.
I'll read it to you.
It says it's a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.
We've spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy.
And after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.
Peter Jankowski, Vice President of Research and Analysis at Arbor Financial Services in Chicago, is still with me.
This is quite a turnaround for Disney and ABC.
Yes, they certainly experienced a great deal of pushback to their decision to pull him off the air.
The stock is down about 2.5% since they basically put the show on hiatus.
But today's decision really hasn't helped the stock very much since it's down a percent today.
They're in a very tough position.
No matter what they do, a sizable segment of the population is going to be upset.
So hopefully they'll learn the lesson and try to moderate the comments of some of their on-air talent going forward and try to steer the shows to being less controversial.
This is not unique to Disney, though.
We're seeing this across the media in the US, in that they're riding a difficult line between a lot of people who are supportive in things like this but also worried about falling foul of the government and what that might mean at the moment.
Well, it's not just falling foul of the government.
Obviously, the entire segment of the market is polarized.
So yes, they certainly were reacting somewhat to statements from the government, but I'm sure they had a number of conservative viewers in mind as they were looking at making these decisions in the first place.
So, it does come down to being a business decision at the end of the day.
And I think we're going to see... Go ahead.
Peter, we will have to leave it there, I'm afraid.
But thank you very much for joining us.
Peter Jankowskis from Arbor Financial Services in Chicago.
That is it from World Business Report.
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