US visa issuance to Indian nationals has fallen sharply under President Donald Trump's immigration policies, with student and exchange visas down 60% and temporary worker visas down 58%, according to a Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis published on 21 October 2026.
The figures cover October 2025 to February 2026, the first five months of the US government's fiscal year 2026, compared with the same period a year earlier. The decline for Indians was far steeper than for Chinese nationals, the other large source country in the comparison: student and exchange visas issued to Chinese nationals fell by around 37%, and temporary worker visas by 30%.
The gap partly reflects how heavily Indians rely on the skilled-worker pathways that have been hit hardest. Indian nationals accounted for about 70% of approved H-1B applicants in fiscal year 2025, according to MPI, making them the group most exposed to any tightening of that programme. Overall, temporary worker visas across all nationalities fell by 29% in the same period, while issuances to Mexicans and British nationals fell by 11% each.
The student numbers tell the same story from a different angle. State Department data shows the US issued 40,077 F-1 student visas to Indians in fiscal year 2025, down from 86,110 the year before — a fall of 53.5%, more than half. Counted by calendar year, the fall is larger still: 30,317 in 2025 against 76,695 in 2024, down 60.5%. The steepest drop came in the summer, when most Indian students get their visas: from May to August 2025, 22,149 F-1 visas were issued to Indians, against 58,694 in the same four months of 2024, a drop of 62.3%.
The decline coincided with a series of measures in 2025 aimed at tightening controls on student and exchange visitor visas. In May 2025, the US temporarily halted new student visa interview appointments worldwide. Appointments later resumed, but under expanded screening procedures — most prominently, broader mandatory social media vetting for applicants under the F, M and J visa categories, who were required to make their social media profiles publicly accessible for consular review. In June 2025, President Trump signed a proclamation suspending the entry of new international students seeking to study at Harvard University, citing national security — an action that quickly became the subject of legal challenges.
The worker side of the story has its own flashpoint: the H-1B programme. In September 2025, the administration announced a $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions, a move that drew lawsuits from employers and universities. On 1 October 2026, a federal judge struck down the latest version of that fee, according to reporting cited by MPI — but the legal fight, and the uncertainty around it, has already changed how employers and applicants behave.
The visa squeeze is not limited to students and skilled workers. The same MPI analysis notes that issuance also fell in exchange visitor categories and in several worker and family-related channels, including visas tied to employment-based immigration and relatives of US citizens, pointing to a wider pullback across both temporary and permanent admissions.
There is also fresh uncertainty around the Green Card Lottery, the Diversity Visa programme that has historically offered a path to the US for people from countries with low immigration rates. The Trump administration paused diversity visa issuance in December 2025; a US District Court ordered the government to resume adjudicating DV-2026 applications, and separately ordered the State Department to open registration for the FY-2027 lottery. The government has appealed both orders and asked the courts to suspend them while the appeals proceed. On 22 October, Republican Representative Keith Self filed a bill to repeal the lottery altogether, calling it "riddled with fraud and weak identity checks". The bill has been referred to committee and must pass both chambers of Congress before it can become law.
For applicants, the practical message is stark: the door to the United States has not been formally closed to most countries, but it has narrowed sharply, and the narrowing has been uneven. Indians, who make up the largest group of international students in the US — 363,019 enrolled in the 2024-25 academic year, ahead of China's 265,919 — have felt it most. Whether the decline persists will depend on future visa policies, processing capacity and employment opportunities, as MPI puts it — and on the courts, which are now deciding how much of the crackdown can stand.
Reporting based on the Migration Policy Institute analysis and The Slate coverage of it.