The United States has suspended eight technology firms — including Microsoft, India’s Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCL Technologies — from hiring skilled international workers on a permanent basis through a widely used visa pathway. New and pending applications under the Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM) are frozen.
Why this particular freeze hurts
For a generation the route was a script: an engineering degree, a tech services job, a posting to the US, repeated visa renewals, then the green card that granted permanent residency. Indians hold the majority of H-1B visas — a temporary visa for specialists — and relied on PERM to convert that into residency and eventually citizenship.
Freezing PERM does not remove anyone. It removes the ending. People stay on a temporary visa, tied to an employer, with no path to the permanence the whole plan was built around.
The companies say it barely matters
Nasscom, the trade body for India’s $300bn technology industry, says Indian companies have reduced their dependence on H-1B visas and are hiring more locally, so “the number of employees transitioning from H-1B visas to permanent residency through the PERM process is also relatively limited”.
The individual statements support that. Wipro says more than 80 per cent of its US workforce is locally hired. TCS says its PERM applications have been in single digits for two years. Microsoft says it files for H-1B visas mostly to retain existing staff rather than import new workers. Business Standard, citing PERM Tracker, reported TCS filings falling to two in 2025–26, from 513 the previous year and 1,804 the year before that; no records were found for Infosys and Wipro in 2025–26. Brokerage HDFC Securities expects minimal impact on revenue.
The BBC emailed all eight companies about the impact and how they were supporting affected employees. None replied.
Both things are true
The corporate impact really is small, because the companies already adapted. The human impact is not small at all, because the people still in the pipeline adapted to nothing — they made a twenty-year plan on the old rules. A fall from 1,804 filings to two is a company succeeding at de-risking; it is also 1,802 individual plans that quietly stopped being possible.
What Bangladesh should read into it
Bangladesh never had this route at scale. Its IT export story has been remote work for foreign clients rather than migration to work for them, and the two models carry opposite risks: the migration route is hostage to immigration policy, the remote route is hostage to client budgets and now to automation.
What is worth noticing is that the Indian industry’s defence — “we hire locally now” — is itself the model Bangladesh already runs. The protection against a visa freeze is not having needed the visa. That is a genuine structural advantage, and it is worth saying out loud in a week when the more common instinct is to read every American restriction as a loss.
There is a second-order effect worth watching. If the American route narrows, the engineers who would have taken it do not vanish — they stay, and the talent that India has been exporting for thirty years starts accumulating at home instead. That is the stated hope of Indian policymakers, and it is plausible. It also makes India a more formidable competitor for exactly the remote and outsourced work Bangladesh sells.
