22/09/2025

BIZ & FINANCE MONDAY | SEPT 22, 2025

/thesuntelegram FOLLOW / Malaysian Paper

ON TELEGRAM m RAM

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H-1B workers abroad rush back to America

Trump administration cancels hunger survey Trump administration announced on Saturday that it was cancelling an annual US food insecurity survey, claiming it had become “overly politicised”, its latest attack on government data gathering. “The US Department of Agri culture (USDA), following conti nuous review of programmes and economic reporting, will discon tinue future Household Food Security Reports,” the agency said in a statement to AFP. According to the USDA, the report “became overly politicised and upon subsequent review, is unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department”. The move to cancel the three-decade-old survey comes after President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress passed major reforms this year to the US food assistance programme known as SNAP, which indepen-dent analysts say will lead to millions losing access to the programme. The 2023 report showed 13.5% of US households faced food insecurity, the highest level since 2014. The USDA statement criticised the survey gathering process, saying the “questions used to collect the data are entirely sub jective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security”. “The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump administration,” the statement said. It was not clear if the USDA statement was referring to hunger data gathered this year, which would not be made public until 2026. US economic data has shown slowing growth and a tightening labor market this year. Trump has dismissed these numbers as inaccurate and fired the head of the Labour Depart ment’s statistics bureau. WASHINGTON: The

about the tariffs for the entire industry”, he acknowledged. Narasimhan said he was not worried about finding enough workers to staff Novartis’s new US factories, anticipating that massive pharmaceutical industry investment pledges would boost the US education system to turn out more specialists. He added that many pharmaceutical factory processes were“fully automated”. “We only need a total of 1,000 to 1,500 additional workers to operate our planned new factories in the US. “That’s manageable.”– AFP return to the U.S. Companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs were among those that sent urgent e-mails to their employees with travel advisories. Since taking office in January, Trump has kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown, including moves to limit some forms of legal immigration. This step to reshape the H-1B visa programme represents his administration’s most high-profile effort yet to rework temporary employment visas and underscores what critics have said is a protectionist agenda. It is a U-turn from Trump’s earlier stance when he sided with one-time ally and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a public dispute over the use of the H-1B visa, saying he fully backed the programme for foreign tech workers even though it was opposed by some of his supporters. Trump administration officials say the visa allows companies to suppress wages, and curbing it opens more jobs for American tech workers. Supporters of the programme argue that it brings in highly skilled workers essential to filling talent gaps and keeping firms competitive. In the hours following Trump’s proclamation, social media was flooded with debate on the scope of the order and dismay at what many saw as a move that dimmed America’s lure as an attractive destination to work in. An anonymous user on Rednote said their life was like that of a “H-1B slave”. The person cut short a holiday in Tokyo to rush back to the United States, describing it as “a real-life Fast & Furious return to the US”, a reference to the hit Hollywood series about street racing. The Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem could exempt petitioners from the fee at her discretion, the proclamation said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday said companies would have to pay US$100,000 per year for H-1B worker visas. However, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X on Saturday that this was not an annual fee, only a one-time fee that applied to each new petition. India was the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas last year, accounting for 71% of approved beneficiaries, while China was a distant second at 11.7%, according to government data. A Nvidia engineer told Reuters at the San Francisco airport that he had been vacationing in Japan with his wife and infant when he rushed to reschedule his return flight after hearing the news. “It feels surreal. Everything is changing in an instant.” – Reuters

“It’s quite tragic. We have built a life here,” he told Reuters. On the popular Chinese social media app Rednote, people on H-1B visas shared their experiences of having to rush back to the US – in some cases just hours after landing in China or another country. Some likened the panic they felt to their experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they urgently flew back to the US before a travel ban took effect. “My feelings are a mix of disappointment, sadness, and frustration,” said one woman in a post with a user handle “Emily’s Life in NY”. The woman said she had boarded a United Airlines flight from New York to Paris, which started taxing, but after some back-and-forth with the airline the captain agreed to return to the gate to let her off the aircraft. Feeling what she described to Reuters as “insignificant” and “shaken”, she cancelled the planned trip to France, abandoning plans with friends, including some who were flying in from China, after she received a letter from her company’s lawyers asking employees abroad to

But Trump’s proclamation a day before had already set off alarm bells in Silicon Valley. Fearing they would not be allowed back once the new rule took effect, several Indian nationals at San Francisco airport said they cut short vacations. “It is a situation where we had to choose between family and staying here,” said an engineer at a large tech company whose wife had been on an Emirates flight from San Francisco to Dubai that was scheduled to depart at 5.05pm local time (6.05pm in Malaysia) on Friday. The flight was delayed by more than three hours after several Indian passengers who received news of the order or memos from their employers demanded to deplane, said the person who spoke on condition of anonymity. At least five passengers were eventually allowed off, said the engineer. A video of the incident was circulating on social media, showing a few people leaving the plane. Reuters could not independently verify the veracity of the video. The engineer’s wife, also a H-1B visa holder, chose to head to India to care for her sick mother.

SAN FRANCISCO: Panic, confusion, and anger reigned as workers on H-1B visas from India and China were forced to abandon travel plans and rush back to the US after President Donald Trump imposed new visa fees, in line with his wide-ranging immigration crackdown. Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos to employees, advising them to return before a deadline of 12.01am US Eastern Time yesterday (12pm in Malaysia), and telling them not to leave the country. A White House official on Saturday clarified that the order applied only to new applicants and not holders of existing visas or those seeking renewals, addressing some of the confusion over who would be affected by the order. o Tech companies urge employees not to leave country amid visa fee confusion

He has nominated E.J. Antoni, a right-wing economist whose commentary has consistently backed the Republican president, to fill the position. – AFP Novartis chief eyes ways to end higher US drug prices Trump speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from a state visit in Britain. – REUTERSPIC

GENEVA: Amid a threat of towering US tariffs, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is seeking ways to enable Americans to pay less for their medicines, its chief said in an interview published on Saturday. Vasant Narasimhan told the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) that his company was“working to eliminate the price gap between the US and other industrialised countries”. “We are working with the government and trying to find constructive solutions so that Americans pay less for their medicines,”he told the Swiss daily.

and packaging in the United States. These efforts, he said, should allow Novartis to weather the situation if pharmaceuticals are hit with the same tariffs Washington has already slapped on other exports from the European countries where it has most of its production. Washington is currently taxing imports from the EU at 15% and from Switzerland at 39%. Novartis’s rapid US expansion “should allow us to fully mitigate any tariffs”, Narasimhan said. The company was “more concerned

meanwhile facing massive pressure from the Trump administration to move production to the United States. Novartis already announced in April that it plans to invest US$23 billion in the United States over five years. The goal was “to manufacture the most important products for the American market locally”, he said, adding that it would “probably take three to four years to get there”. But he estimated the company could “make significant shifts within the next two years”, including carrying out some of the final filling

While pharmaceutical products have been spared so far from the tariffs Washington has slapped on its trading partners, US President Donald Trump has threatened to hit the entire sector with tariffs of as much as 250% if drug prices do not drop. Narasimhan suggested it made sense to bring down US prices. “It is a fact that American patients pay for a large part of the innovations,” he acknowledged to the NZZ, insisting that “countries outside the US will have to contribute a larger share in the future”. Pharmaceutical companies are