URBANA — This is Naavya Shetty’s final semester at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s an international student from Mumbai, India, who chose the U.S. as the destination to pursue her dreams of bridging liberal arts and hard science.
But following recent changes to federal policies that impact foreign workers, Shetty worries her goal of securing a job in the U.S. post-grad might become significantly harder.
In September, President Trump signed an executive order requiring companies seeking to hire international workers to pay $100,000 for each H-1B visa application.
The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers. Each year, only a certain number of these visas are available — 65,000 for most applicants, plus an extra 20,000 for those with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution. The number of applications tends to exceed the cap, so applicants are entered into a lottery to determine who gets a visa.
The majority of H-1B visa holders in the U.S. are STEM professionals. Shetty studies computer science and philosophy, and chose U of I for its prestigious engineering program.
Coming to the U.S. was not an easy decision for her because of the cost of international student tuition – almost $65,000 a year.
“In order to come here, I had to take a student loan, with a particularly high rate of interest,” she said. “My parents had to mortgage our house in order for me to be able to take that loan.”
Her plan has been to get her bachelor’s degree, land a job to pay off her loan with an American salary, and then pursue her dream: a career in academia. New barriers to finding a job post-graduation could jeopardize these plans.
“If I do not manage to get a job, there is quite a lot of burden on me and my family financially,” Shetty said. “The average graduate student salary for my field is estimated to be about 100K, whereas in India, the estimated cost is around 15 to 20 lakhs” — equivalent to roughly $17,000 a year.
The federal agency overseeing the H-1B program said last week that students who have F-1 visas will not be affected by the $100,000 fee. But the exemption only applies if students are able to secure a job right out of school, without leaving the U.S., in order to make the switch from F-1 to H-1B.
“What we [international students] felt would happen was that all these companies would develop a sense of uncertainty about hiring international students,” Shetty said. “Because who knows when a new law is going to pass that makes them have to pay a lot more for us than we might actually be ‘worth.’”
The $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications is a significant jump from the $2,000 to $5,000 that employers used to pay. Many companies and institutions will not be able to afford that higher price tag, causing them to hire fewer foreign workers.
Some big companies, like Walmart, have already announced a halt to H-1B visa sponsorships; Others have announced positions are only open for those “who are authorized to work in the United States.”
Some economists point to research suggesting this could lead to higher wages for workers in those fields. The other side of that coin: A decline in foreign STEM workers will lead to an overall decrease in innovation and productivity for the U.S. economy.
What H-1B policy changes could mean for students
Landing a job in the computer science field as a foreign worker was already a near-impossible task, which has gotten even harder, Shetty said. The computer science job market has become more competitive over the years, with the unemployment rate reaching 6.1% in 2025— one of the highest among STEM majors.
She said she has already applied for more than 200 jobs since the end of August.
For her first job out of school, Shetty will have three years of work authorization thanks to an F-1 visa benefit known as Optional Practical Training, or OPT. For most STEM majors, OPT is three years; for liberal arts majors, it’s one year.
After that, she’ll have to navigate the process of finding an employer to sponsor her H-1B visa application.
She worries companies may rule her out simply because she’s an international student, without even considering her qualifications.
Nearly 99% of Fortune 500 companies and many other employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which automatically scan an applicant’s resume and cover letter, filtering out some applications before a recruiter even sees them.
Many companies include the question: “Do you require sponsorship now or in the future?” That’s when things get tricky.
“I should be considered the same as any other student who doesn’t require sponsorship [because of OPT], however, because they ask for the future, we are required to tick that box, thus making us a little more unfavored in the ATS system,” Shetty said.
Shetty said she’s aware that some international students tick “No” in response to the sponsorship question – believing it is the only way to secure a job.
What H-1B changes mean for the U.S. economy
H-1B visa benefits are the way to boost the local economy, said Eva Dziadula, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame.
“The U.S. — with the quality of education and then the opportunities for people to be able to get work experience and perhaps then apply for a high-skilled visa like the H-1B — is an incentive for people to want to come to the U.S and study. It’s a way for us to attract talent,” Dziadula said. “There’s plenty of literature showing the increase in innovation, higher productivity, which means gains for everybody who lives in the U.S.”
Recent anti-immigrant sentiment and policies has many students worried, she said.
“The U.S has always been a popular destination, but when you talk to students, especially for students in Asia who are a large proportion of the recipients, they’re looking at schools in the U.K. and in Australia,” she said. “The U.S. does not seem to be as attractive.”
International students’ contributions to the U.S. economy from 2023 to 2024 was over $43.8 billion and supported over 378,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the annual contribution of H-1B workers is even higher: around $86 billion.
Losing international students and workers means losing top talent, Dziadula said.
The impacts are far-reaching, as H-1B benefits fields like information technology, and technology is involved in all aspects of society, Dziadula said.
“Whether it’s logistics in getting Amazon shipped to our house to literally every aspect of our lives,” she said. “And if that can be done cheaper, then we’re all benefiting from having more money left in our pockets.”
She added that H-1B workers are a “win-win, even if you don’t care about the immigrants themselves, because they are expanding the opportunities, keeping costs down and expanding markets.”
Part of the rationale behind Trump’s proclamation was to increase jobs for Americans. But it could be challenging to fill the gap with American workers of the same caliber and productivity short-term, Dziadula said.
“Firms are maximizing profits – that is their ultimate objective…and that comes from trying to get a bigger revenue and a lower cost,” she said. “If those workers [on H-1B visas] were not worth it… if they had an option of a local person that was just as productive… they would do that.”
Hope for the future
Despite the recent H-1B fee exemption for students on F-1 visas, Dziadula said the uncertainty is still there and employers may remain hesitant to hire international students.
“If they [the government] can change their mind tomorrow or any time in the next three years, I would be worried if I’m running a company and I’m thinking about hiring a foreign worker,” she said.
Shetty said this worries her.
“This entire thing has just made international students look like we’re unwanted or we are aliens in this country,” she said. “Regardless of our qualifications and all of that stuff, it does make us seem like a group that a law could be passed against.”
Amid these federal changes, Shetty said she has started applying to jobs in India and also Japan, where the policies are more welcoming towards foreign workers, “despite knowing that this would greatly delay my life plans [of] paying off my loan.”
But she remains hopeful for additional H-1B policy clarifications that could alleviate hiring managers’ concerns about foreign workers.
“I’m also hoping that they will come to see that we are just as much a part of their country, even though we may not hold the citizenship,” Shetty said. “That does not mean that all the concern is gone… because it seems like this wall has erupted out of nowhere.”