Every few years, Washington slams a door and Asia is told to catch the people falling out of it. It happened after the dot-com bubble. It happened after the 2020 H-1B tightening. It is happening again now, and the instinct across Southeast Asian boardrooms and government press releases will be the same: cue the victory lap.
Before anyone in Singapore, Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City breaks out the “brain gain” slide deck, it is worth asking whether this region has ever actually won this fight, or just told itself it did.
A door slams, again
In late August, the Trump administration proposed a US$103,265 annual fee for new H-1B visas, a near-500-fold jump from the previous US$215 charge. It follows an earlier US$100,000 fee announced last September that briefly triggered chaos — with Amazon, Microsoft and JPMorgan telling H-1B staff to rush back into the US before a midnight deadline — before a US court struck it down.
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The back-and-forth has not calmed anyone’s nerves. Fiscal year 2027 H-1B registrations have fallen 38.5 per cent, and workers are increasingly weighing Canada, the UK and the Gulf as landing spots instead of gambling on Washington’s next move.
On workplace forum Blind, sentiment has gone from outrage to something closer to resignation, a shift TeamBlind chief executive Sunguk Moon has called a trust signal more telling than any hiring statistic.
Indian voices reacted fastest and loudest, given that Indian nationals hold roughly 70 per cent of H-1B visas. Former NITI Aayog chief executive Amitabh Kant framed it bluntly on social media as America’s loss and India’s gain, predicting the fee would push “the next wave of labs, patents, innovation and startups” toward Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurugram. Andhra Pradesh’s IT minister has talked up the state’s role in a national “brain gain” story built on Global Capability Centres (GCCs), the in-house offshore units multinationals now use for product development and R&D rather than back-office support. India already hosts around 1,700 of them, generating an estimated US$68 billion in direct value-add, and more than 35,000 returning technologists have joined GCCs, homegrown startups or global delivery centres since 2022.
We have run this experiment before
This is not a new story, which is precisely the point. Research from economists Gaurav Khanna and Nicolas Morales on the original dot-com-era H-1B cap found that Indian engineers who were shut out of the US, or who returned home after their visas expired, helped build India’s software export industry into a global force — a genuine, measurable case of one country’s restriction becoming another’s foundation. It is the closest thing this debate has to a control group, and the finding cuts both ways: brain gain is real, but it took a generation to compound, not a single visa cycle.
Southeast Asia’s own attempt to capture skilled migration has moved at a similarly unglamorous pace. Singapore’s Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass (ONE Pass), the country’s marquee tool for luring senior global talent with no requirement to work for a single employer, has grown from roughly 3,600 holders at the end of 2023 to 8,500 by the end of 2025. Respectable growth, except official figures show only around one in six ONE Passes issued in 2024 went to genuinely new entrants rather than people already working in Singapore switching pass types.
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Compare that with Hong Kong’s rival Top Talent Pass Scheme, which had drawn more than 150,000 applications and approved over 120,000 within three years by early 2026. Singapore is not losing this race by default; it simply is not winning it by nearly the margin the press releases imply.
What would actually make this a gift
Singapore is not standing still. From January 2027, its ONE Pass will gain a dedicated AI and Tech track, alongside rising salary floors for Employment Pass and S Pass holders, a deliberate bet on quality over volume. But a work pass, however well designed, addresses only the entry point. It says nothing about what happens once someone lands: whether the ecosystem around them can actually absorb senior engineering leadership, whether compensation and equity structures compete with what a US offer once did, and whether a returning or relocating technologist finds a real career ceiling or a glass one.
That is where the H-1B shock differs from a straightforward regional windfall. The people most likely to leave the US over a six-figure visa fee are not junior developers; they are precisely the senior, experienced hires that Southeast Asian startups have always struggled hardest to attract and retain, because the region’s funding rounds, valuations and equity culture still lag Silicon Valley’s. A US$103,265 fee does not automatically convert into a queue of veteran engineers knocking on Grab’s or Sea’s door. It converts into a queue of people evaluating every plausible alternative to the US at once, with Toronto, London, Dubai and Bangalore competing for the same talent Jakarta or Manila would also like to claim.
The real test
If Southeast Asia wants this to be more than a talking point, the fix is unglamorous: close the pay gap for senior technical and research roles, make equity genuinely competitive rather than symbolic, and treat immigration policy as one lever among several rather than the whole strategy.
India’s GCC boom did not happen because Bangalore issued a nicer visa; it happened because the work itself moved there, product mandates and all. Singapore’s ONE Pass numbers will keep climbing regardless of what Washington does next, because the pass was never really about H-1B refugees in the first place.
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The US$103,265 fee is real, and it will genuinely push some skilled workers out of America’s orbit. Whether Southeast Asia captures them, or simply watches them pass through on the way to somewhere with deeper pockets, depends on decisions the region’s founders, investors and policymakers were already supposed to be making before this latest headline gave them an excuse to feel optimistic instead.
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