Daybreak - When Trump made H-1B visas costlier, these workers saw the silver lining

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Trump hiked H-1B visa fees overnight. For Indian students and engineers, it was a shock. For GCC employees, it was a chance to step up.While global capability  centres handle tech, ops, and innovation, final decisions usually stay in the US. Senior employees started to wonder: could the visa disruption finally shift some power to India? In this episode, we explore why GCCs’ leap from execution to strategy is still far from guaranteed.Tune in.⏳ How is AI changing your workday? Take our 5-minute survey: https://theken.typeform.com/to/yQTIGKihDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. On a random Friday in September, the leader of the free world woke up and chose chaos. Trump's proclamation of a $100,000 fee hike on H-1B visas had everyone from students to tech employees scrambling. Because the golden ticket that let Indian engineers work at the mecca of all things IT in California instead of Bangalore was suddenly gone. But, and this may come as a surprise,

a different set of workers in India are feeling oddly optimistic. They see Trump's announcement as a possible blessing in disguise. These are employees at global capability centers or GCCs. Basically, Actually, GCCs are offshore offices set up by multinational companies in countries like India to handle their tech, operations and support work in-house. So yes, people working at these GCCs think their movement has finally come. To understand why, let me take you back to when the Trump administration made this announcement. Well, they're $100,000 per year. So the whole idea is no more, we have these big tech companies or other big companies

trained foreign workers. They have to pay the government $100,000, then they have to pay the employee. So it's just not economic. If you're going to train somebody, you're going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land, train Americans, stop bringing in people to take our jobs. That's the policy here. A hundred thousand dollars a year for H-1B visas and all of the big companies are on board. We've spoken. We've spoken to to them about the gold card. They love it. They love it. They really love it. They need it. That was Howard Lutnik, the Secretary of Commerce of the United States, with Donald Trump

at the end, adding that the big companies love it and need it. Now, we don't really know if that's really the case. But it has set the ball of expected consequences rolling. Just this week, Walmart, one of the biggest retail hirers of H-1B visa holders, announced that it would be hitting pause on hiring H-1B hopefuls. Now, back to the GCCs, and what could possibly be the silver lining for them in what is a dark cloud for several others? You see, the whole idea of global giants setting up GCCs in locations outside their countries of origin is to get access to a bigger and more diverse talent pool.

And we're talking about thousands of such employees. But here's a twist. They have never really enjoyed decisional power. That is, until now. The thing is, a lot of big American companies, like Walmart, are getting deterred by Trump's hefty fee. So GCC employees in India think that now, companies might finally trust them with bigger, more strategic roles. But the reality on ground looks a little more complicated than that. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken.

I'm your host, Rachel Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-hosts, Nikda Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today's Friday, the 24th of October. Let me paint a picture for you. We're in Bangalore at an innovation centre in a glass building next to a very crowded road. The Walmart Global Tech Executive is on a call with his US counterparts

on a late September evening. His team has come up with a rather brilliant idea about an inventory system. Something they believe could help stores anticipate demand better. As he delivers about money, authority and structure, the minutes stretch on. And the idea eventually becomes just another task on a global checklist.

That's the arc that most ideas born in GCC's take. And that's what I meant when I said earlier that GCC's don't enjoy decisional power. You see, on paper, GCC seem like the perfect fix to the visa squeeze. India has more than 1,700 of them and most are in Bangalore. Nearly two-thirds of Fortune Global 30 companies and more than 170 Fortune 500 companies have GCCs here. And over the decades, these centers have evolved from back offices to product engineering and innovation hubs. Some have even produced global leaders like Suresh Kumar, Walmart CTO and Ankur Mital, who's the CTO of Lowe's India. But for every success story, there are dozens where the hierarchy hasn't shifted at all.

Only a handful of Indian GCCs have true CXO-level decision-makers and senior employees are starting to wonder. Is it the lack of decision-making power that keeps them from moving beyond just execution? Like Suresh, a former GCC employee said, even if Indian GCCs are being asked to lead, they are not yet trusted to decide. You see, a typical centre now has three times as many vice presidents per capita as its global peers. Even then, most proposals need four to six layers of approval for decisions the US counterparts often make by themselves.

A former J.P. Morgan executive told my colleague the Ken reporter Muromai that they'd actually have VPs in India doing work that was associate level in New York. Basically, even if the title was global, the responsibility wasn't. And this was at a decade-old GCC. JPMorgan's Anglo-GCC employs over 50,000 people. But even here, decisions were mapped according to cost and compliance. And the story is the same across companies. Even though nearly 95% of Indian GCCs call themselves innovation hubs,

only about 10% actually generate any intellectual property. And only under 15% contribute directly to product development. Take target corporations GCC for instance. Nearly a quarter of the global workforce sits in Bangalore. One senior employee recalled that they had once designed a digital campaign from scratch but when it came down to the final decisions it went back to Minneapolis. He told us that it was things like this that reminded employees that the leash is still tight. At Lowes India, it's a similar tale.

Even though it was a Bangal team that built and tested a new support system, it was headquarters that made the final call. As a former executive said in frustration, we were just executing someone else's final draft. And that frustration stays constant across companies. This tension between ambitious innovation mandates and constraining authority is why innovation as a term itself is quite slippery in GCCs. Basically, whatever innovation does happen is severely slowed by the process of gaining approvals.

Still, everyone wants to claim that innovation tag. as Gaurav Parab, a principal research analyst at Nelson Hall put it, if you don't say you're innovative, why would anyone bring their business to you? So the H-1B visa hike should have been the turning point for GCC leaders getting more say. But that hope seems to be fizzling out. More on this in the next segment. Hi, I'm Rahal, the host and producer of 90,000 hours,

the Ken's podcast on the future of careers and workplaces. I'm pausing this episode to ask you, a very quick question. How much time has AI actually saved you at work? Now, I admit, it's not something most of us think about. I hadn't either.

But now that tools like chat GPT, Gemini, Clod, perplexity, have all become almost indispensable. It's worth asking, are they really living up to their promise? Are they making our workday shorter by taking tasks of our hands?

And if they are, What are you doing with that time? I'd love to know. We are running a short survey for an upcoming episode of 90,000 hours. You'll find the link in the show notes. It will just take you five minutes. And with that out of the way, let's get back to the episode. Soon after Trump's visa fee announcement,

the Indian government seemed to go all in. In fact, some reports show that the IT ministry had begun talks with NASCOM and major IT firms. They wanted to shift their US-based employees to GCCC's in India. A former Loz India executive said that the visa squeeze should have been their movement. But unfortunately, it seems like the leadership in U.S. companies see risk everywhere in India as well. In policy, optics and taxes. And of course, for the Trump administration, the priority is Americans and American jobs. In the statement about the H-1B order, a worrying trend was highlighted.

Unemployment among computer professionals in the U.S. had risen to over 3%, up from under 2% 6 years earlier. And the Republican Party had even proposed a new bill. It called for a 25% tax on services bought from foreign companies. The spirit of the proposed law is obvious. Secure employment for US citizens. So it isn't too much of a stretch to believe that GCC's would be taxed more as well. And that perception, Indian employees said, would halt any expected power transitions.

A senior target executive shared that even if the H1B squeeze changed the talent equation, it wouldn't make companies automatically hand over authority to their employees in India. And as long as headquarters weigh politics, taxes and control first, for GCC's here, it means growth without the corresponding power. At least for now. Still, some GCC employees see the light. The visa problem could be a blessing in disguise. if GCCs reposition themselves as hubs for product engineering.

Phil Fesht, the founder of Global Consultancy HFS research, says that GCCs are the natural landing pad for this talent because they provide scale, continuity and integration into global delivery without visa friction. The real issue isn't really capacity, but ensuring that roles are designed around outcomes instead of cheap delivery. But like we mentioned earlier, others still believe that uncertainty around taxes and visa rules will make sure the power dynamic doesn't change.

Gaurav Parab, the analyst from earlier, stressed that companies would think twice before making new investments in, say, a GCC in bankroll, especially since the rules are being written by a protectionist regime protecting U.S. jobs. And the thing is, that data holds weight. Take this example that Gorev Parab shared with us, for instance. He said that a U.S.-based company makes 10,000 jobs. jobs in the US redundant when it replaces them with H1B hires or GCCs. So you can see why there's definitely a lot of support for these new policies,

even if some of them may not be legally sound. For example, on 3rd October, a coalition of unions and employers legally challenged Trump's decision to hike visa fees. So as of now, one thing remains clear. The visa fee hike may have redrawn the immigration map. But for the most part, the GCC compass still points west. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings.

A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Virgis and edited by Rajiv Sien.