News

The 2026 H-1B Bill That Would End the Green-Card Pathway: What It Would Mean for Indians, If It Passed

A US bill would cut H-1B to two years and end the green-card pathway. What it proposes, why it is unlikely to pass, and what Indians on H-1B should do now.

Rakesh Sinha, NRI Finance WriterReviewed 11 June 202619 min read

On June 4, 2026, a Texas Republican, Representative Chip Roy, introduced a bill called the American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act. Among other things, it would shorten the H-1B visa from a maximum of six years to two years, scrap the lottery in favour of a wage-ranked selection, eliminate the OPT work programme for international graduates, and end the use of the H-1B as a route to a green card by removing "dual intent" for future H-1B holders. For an Indian software engineer in Austin or Seattle who has spent eight years waiting in the employment-based green-card queue, that last line lands like a punch.

So let me say the most important thing first, before anything else: this is an introduced bill, not a law. As of today, June 11, 2026, it has been referred to a handful of House committees and has not passed a single one of them. The honest read is that most bills introduced in Congress die quietly in committee, and this one faces long odds. That does not make it irrelevant. It makes it a signal worth reading carefully and planning around, without losing your head.

The 30-second answer: The American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act, introduced by Representative Chip Roy on June 4, 2026, is a proposed bill, not law. It would cut the H-1B from six years to two, replace the lottery with wage-ranked selection, eliminate OPT, and end the H-1B-to-green-card pathway by removing dual intent. As of June 11, 2026 it sits in House committee with around nine cosponsors and has passed nothing. It would still need House passage, Senate passage (likely 60 votes), and a presidential signature. The realistic odds of enactment as written are low. Indians are disproportionately exposed because of a multi-decade EB-2 and EB-3 green-card backlog, so the smart response is contingency planning, a cash runway and a parallel visa option, not panic.

This piece does three things. First, it lays out exactly what the bill says, based on the text as introduced and the sponsor's own description, separating that from speculation. Second, it explains, honestly, why this is early-stage and faces real hurdles, and how it differs from the separate USD 100,000 H-1B fee proclamation that a federal court vacated on June 8, 2026. Third, and most usefully, it walks through the money-and-career contingency planning an Indian on H-1B should be doing now, including a worked runway calculation, regardless of whether this particular bill goes anywhere. Calm, specific, and clear about what is fact and what is not.

What the bill actually proposes

Let me give you the provisions as they appear in the bill as introduced and in Representative Roy's own statement, and nothing more. Where I am inferring or where detail is genuinely unsettled, I will say so.

The bill is titled the American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act and was introduced by Representative Chip Roy of Texas (R-TX21) on June 4, 2026. Arizona Republican Eli Crane is among the cosponsors. The stated purpose is to prioritise American workers, particularly in STEM fields. The concrete provisions reported from the text are these:

A two-year cap on the H-1B. The maximum duration of an H-1B would fall from the current six years to two years. Today, an H-1B is granted for three years and renewable to six, with further extensions available beyond six years for people stuck in the green-card backlog under the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000 (AC21). A two-year ceiling would compress all of that dramatically.
End of the lottery, move to wage-ranked selection. Instead of the current random lottery for the 85,000 annual cap, petitions would be ranked by salary, with employers required to offer wages at or above the 75th percentile for the occupation in that location. Higher-paid roles would win. Entry-level and mid-level roles, where many Indian graduates start, would lose out.
Elimination of OPT. Optional Practical Training, the programme that lets international students, including a very large number of Indians on F-1 visas, work in the US for up to three years after graduating in STEM fields, would be scrapped. This matters because OPT is, for many, the bridge into the H-1B in the first place.
End of the H-1B-to-green-card pathway by removing dual intent. This is the headline for our reader. Today the H-1B is a "dual intent" visa, which means you can hold it while openly pursuing permanent residence. The bill would require H-1B applicants to demonstrate they maintain a residence abroad and do not intend to abandon it, the same standard applied to genuinely temporary visas. Remove dual intent and the H-1B stops being a natural on-ramp to a green card.
Tougher employer obligations. Employers would have to prove no qualified US worker is available, advertise roles to US workers, offer the job to an equally or better qualified American, and certify that hiring a foreign worker would not harm US wages or conditions. Companies could not lay off US workers in similar roles within a year of an H-1B hire, and no more than 5 percent of a company's US workforce could be made up of nonimmigrant workers.

That 5 percent cap, if you work at a large IT services or product firm, is the quiet bombshell sitting underneath the green-card headline. It would force a structural rethink of how many of the big employers are staffed.

Now the hedges, and they matter. The exact statutory text, the effective dates, and crucially how the bill would treat people already in the green-card queue or already on H-1B, are the kind of details that get rewritten, softened, or dropped entirely in committee. An introduced bill is a starting position, not a final rule. Do not plan your life around any single clause of it as if it were settled. It is not.

Why this is early-stage, and the hurdles it faces

Here is the honest framing on odds, and I am not going to sugar-coat it in either direction.

A bill becomes law only after it clears a long sequence: committee approval, a vote on the House floor, passage in the Senate, reconciliation of any differences, and a presidential signature. As of June 11, 2026 this bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, and additionally to the Committees on Homeland Security, Ways and Means, and Foreign Affairs. Being referred to four committees is not a sign of momentum. It is a sign of a wide-ranging bill that has to satisfy several gatekeepers, each of which can let it die.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Republicans hold a narrow House majority, and a narrow majority leaves little room for defections on a bill that splits the party between immigration hawks and the business wing that relies on skilled foreign labour. Even if it cleared the House, the Senate is the real wall. Most significant legislation needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and there is no plausible path to 60 votes for a bill this restrictive in the current Senate. On top of that, the Trump administration has given no public indication that it intends to push to eliminate the H-1B through legislation, and several large technology companies that the administration courts would oppose it hard.

The base rate is the clincher. The vast majority of bills introduced in any session of Congress never even get a committee vote, let alone become law. Newsweek itself framed this as a "long-shot bid", and that is the accurate description. The realistic probability that this bill is enacted as written is low.

So why write about it at all? Because direction matters even when a specific vehicle stalls. This is now the second high-profile attempt in under a year to squeeze the H-1B, after the fee proclamation. When the same idea keeps resurfacing from different directions, the prudent move is not to predict which attempt succeeds. It is to make sure you are not caught flat-footed if one eventually does, in some form, years from now. That is planning, not prophecy.

How this differs from the USD 100,000 fee proclamation

Readers will conflate this bill with the separate USD 100,000 H-1B fee that dominated headlines through late 2025 and into 2026. They are different things, and the distinction is important. We cover the fee saga in detail in a sibling guide on the 2026 H-1B visa fee changes, so here I will keep it to the contrast.

The fee came from a presidential proclamation, Proclamation 10973, signed on September 19, 2025, which imposed a USD 100,000 supplemental payment on new H-1B petitions for people outside the US. That was executive action, not legislation. On June 8, 2026, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts vacated that fee in its entirety, ruling that it was effectively a tax that only Congress can impose, and that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The government is expected to appeal, so that story is not fully closed, but for now the fee is struck down.

The contrast is the whole point:

The fee was an executive proclamation. Fast to impose, and, as it turned out, vulnerable in court precisely because the executive cannot levy a tax. It existed, then a court erased it.
This bill is the opposite. It is the legislative route, which is exactly where the court told the executive that power actually lives. Legislation is far slower and far harder to pass, but if it ever did pass, it would be far harder to challenge, because Congress does have the constitutional authority to set immigration and tax rules.

So the two are not duplicates. They are two different doors into the same room. One door was kicked open quickly and then slammed shut by a judge. The other door is the legitimate one, and it is heavy, rusted, and currently barely ajar. For your planning, the takeaway is simple: the legal system just demonstrated that overreach gets reversed, which is reassuring, while also reminding you that the durable threat, if it ever materialises, comes through Congress and moves on a multi-year clock.

Why Indians are disproportionately exposed

Nobody on an H-1B has a comfortable seat right now, but Indians sit in the most exposed row, and the reason is arithmetic, not sentiment.

Employment-based green cards are capped per country at roughly 7 percent of the annual total. India sends a hugely disproportionate share of H-1B workers, so the demand from Indian nationals vastly exceeds that 7 percent allocation. The result is a backlog measured not in months but in years and decades. Depending on the category and your priority date, an Indian national in the EB-2 or EB-3 queue can be looking at a wait that, on current run rates, stretches well beyond a decade, and for some cohorts the estimates run far longer. We go deep on the numbers in our guide on the US green-card backlog for India.

Sit with what that means against this bill. The whole premise of staying on an H-1B for many Indians is that you renew past six years, under AC21, precisely because you are stuck in the green-card queue. A two-year H-1B cap and the removal of dual intent attack the exact mechanism that has kept this cohort legally in the US while they wait. The people least affected by an end to the green-card pathway are nationals of countries with no backlog, who convert to a green card in a year or two anyway. The people most affected are the Indians who have already invested eight, ten, twelve years into a queue that this bill would, in its harshest reading, pull the floor out from under.

This is why I keep returning to optionality. The exposure is structural. It predates this bill, it will outlast this bill, and it is the real reason an Indian professional in the US should hold a contingency plan even in a year when no bill passes.

A worked example: the contingency runway

Let me make this concrete, because abstractions do not protect anyone. The single most useful thing you can do, today, is build a cash runway that means a sudden status loss is a problem, not a catastrophe.

Suppose you are an Indian software engineer in the Seattle area. Your fixed and near-fixed US monthly outgoings look something like this:

Rent: USD 2,800
Groceries and household: USD 900
Car payment, insurance and fuel: USD 700
Health insurance and medical (if you lose employer cover): USD 600
Utilities, phone, internet: USD 350
Childcare or school: USD 1,200
Buffer for the unexpected: USD 450

That totals USD 7,000 a month in a realistic post-job-loss scenario, where you have lost employer health cover and stripped out discretionary spending. Now layer on the immigration clock. If your H-1B employment ends, you generally have a 60-day grace period to find a new sponsoring employer, change status, or depart. Sixty days is two months, and in a tougher hiring market it can take far longer than that to land a new H-1B-sponsoring role.

So how much runway do you actually want?

A bare minimum of three months covers the 60-day grace period plus a short tail: 3 times USD 7,000 = USD 21,000.
A sensible target is six months, which buys you time to either secure a new sponsor or arrange an orderly relocation: 6 times USD 7,000 = USD 42,000.
A robust target, given the structural backlog exposure, is nine months: 9 times USD 7,000 = USD 63,000.

I would push most Indian H-1B families in the backlog toward the six-to-nine-month band, not the three-month minimum, precisely because your immigration timeline is longer and less forgiving than a US citizen colleague's. The point of this cash is not investment return. It is that it removes the gun from your own head. With nine months of expenses sitting in liquid savings, you never have to accept a bad job, sell equity at the bottom, or make a panicked relocation decision inside a 60-day window. You buy yourself the ability to think.

A note on where that runway sits. Keep it liquid and keep it accessible from wherever you might end up. A large lump only reachable through a frozen US bank account during a status emergency is less useful than it looks. Some should sit in your US accounts, some can sit in India in NRE or NRO deposits, and the split should reflect where you would actually need to spend it. That is portfolio and currency diversification doing real work, not theory.

What to do now: the practical contingency plan

None of what follows assumes the bill passes. All of it assumes you want optionality in a system that just reminded everyone how quickly the rules can be proposed to change. Here is the honest checklist.

1. Build the cash runway. Six to nine months of US living expenses, liquid, as calculated above. This is the foundation. Everything else is easier once this exists.

2. Get your documents in order. Keep current copies of your passport, every I-797 approval notice, recent pay stubs, your I-140 approval or receipt, and your priority-date confirmation. In a status emergency or a fast move, having this folder ready saves weeks.

3. Understand your 60-day grace period cold. If your H-1B employment ends, the clock starts. Know that you can use the period to find a new sponsor and port your petition, change to another status, or depart in an orderly way. We have a dedicated guide on the 60-day grace period and your options after a layoff on H-1B; read it before you ever need it, not after.

4. Open a parallel immigration option. This is the single most underused move. Canada's Express Entry is the obvious first parallel for many Indian tech workers, and your US experience often scores well; we have a full guide on Express Entry for Indians. The UK's Skilled Worker and Global Talent routes and Australia's skilled PR pathways are also worth scoring yourself against. You do not have to use them. You want to know your number and your eligibility before you are forced to care.

5. Plan for dependants. If your spouse is on H-4 with an EAD, their right to work is tied to your status and to rules that themselves face periodic challenge. Understand exactly what happens to their work authorisation if your H-1B lapses. Our guide on H-4 EAD spouse work rights covers the mechanics.

6. Diversify your money across geographies and currencies. Do not have every asset locked in one country's banking system and one currency. A sensible Indian H-1B household holds a US emergency fund, an India corpus in NRE or NRO accounts, and a long-term portfolio that is not 100 percent exposed to a single jurisdiction's rules. If you ever relocate, this is what lets you move without a fire sale.

7. Do not make irreversible moves on an introduced bill. Do not quit, do not sell your house, do not pull your kids out of school because of a bill that has passed no committee. Reversible preparation, yes. Irreversible reaction to early-stage legislation, no.

The thread running through all seven is the same: build options so that whatever happens, with this bill or the next one or none of them, you are choosing from a position of strength rather than reacting from a position of fear.

Edge cases

The general story is clear. The exceptions are where people get tripped up, so let me name them.

Bill versus law. I will repeat it because it is the single most important distinction in this entire piece. An introduced bill changes nothing about your current status or timeline. Until a bill passes both chambers and is signed, your H-1B, your I-140, your priority date and your renewal rights are exactly what they were the day before it was introduced. Read the bill as a weather forecast, not a flood at your door.

The 60-day grace period nuance. The 60 days runs from the end of employment, not from when you find out. It is a hard window and it does not reset. If you are laid off, treat day one as day one. The grace period also lets you change to a different nonimmigrant status, for example to a dependent or visitor status, to remain lawfully present while you sort out next steps, which is sometimes overlooked in the rush to find another H-1B sponsor.

Dependants and H-4. H-4 status and any H-4 EAD are derivative of the principal H-1B. If the principal loses status, dependants are affected too. This is why a single-earner H-1B household carries more concentrated risk than it feels like day to day, and why the runway and the parallel plan matter more, not less, when a family depends on one visa.

Backlog cohorts are not all the same. "The India backlog" is not one undifferentiated mass. Someone with a priority date from many years ago, an approved I-140, and years of H-1B time accrued sits in a very different position from someone who just started OPT this year. The earlier cohort has more vested expectations that legislation would more likely grandfather, though nothing is guaranteed. The newest entrants, especially anyone relying on OPT as their entry point, are the most exposed to a bill like this one, because OPT is what the bill would eliminate outright. Know which cohort you are in, because your risk and your priorities differ accordingly.

The appeal on the fee. Remember that the USD 100,000 fee was vacated on June 8, 2026 but the government is expected to appeal. So even the news that looks settled is not fully settled. This is the broader lesson: in this area, treat every headline as provisional and keep your plan robust to either outcome.

The closing read

The honest read is this. A US lawmaker introduced a bill on June 4, 2026 that would, if enacted as written, gut the H-1B and end the green-card pathway that hundreds of thousands of Indians are depending on. It is a serious proposal and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it is a bill, not a law, it has passed nothing, it faces a narrow House majority, a 60-vote Senate wall, an administration that has not embraced it, and the base rate that says most bills die in committee. The realistic odds of enactment as written are low.

That is the calm half. Here is the other half. The fact that the same idea keeps coming back, first as a fee struck down in court, now as legislation, tells you the political direction of travel. You cannot control that. What you can control is your own resilience. Build the six-to-nine-month cash runway. Keep your documents ready. Know your 60-day grace period. Open a parallel immigration door in Canada, the UK or Australia so it exists if you ever need it. Diversify your money across countries and currencies. Plan for your dependants.

Do all of that and you are not betting on whether this bill passes. You are making yourself indifferent to the question, because whatever Washington does, you have options. That is the only position worth being in. Prepare like an adult, do not panic like a headline, and keep living your life.

Related guides

Disclaimer: This guide is general information, not legal or immigration advice, and it describes a bill that is not law. US immigration legislation and policy are fast-moving and may change after the date of publication; the American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act described here is an introduced bill that, as of June 11, 2026, has not passed any committee or chamber, and the separate USD 100,000 H-1B fee was vacated by a federal court on June 8, 2026 with a government appeal expected. Your status, eligibility, priority date and grace-period rights depend on your specific facts. Consult a licensed US immigration attorney before making any decision about your visa, your green-card process, or a relocation, and consult a qualified cross-border tax and financial adviser before moving money across jurisdictions.

Frequently asked questions

Is the 2026 H-1B bill now law?

No. The American White-Collar Worker Jobs Act, introduced by Representative Chip Roy on June 4, 2026, is an introduced bill, not a law. As of June 11, 2026 it has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee and three other committees, with around nine cosponsors. To become law it would need to pass committee, pass the full House, pass the Senate (almost certainly needing 60 votes to clear a filibuster), and be signed by the President. It has cleared none of those steps. Most introduced bills never receive a committee vote. Treat it as a signal of political direction, not an immediate change to your status or your timeline.

Would the bill cancel green cards already in process for Indians?

The bill is not law, so nothing changes today. The text as introduced targets the H-1B-to-green-card pathway and removes dual intent for future H-1B holders. How it would treat people already in the EB-2 and EB-3 queue, who number in the hundreds of thousands of Indians, is exactly the kind of detail that gets fought over in committee and is not settled by an introduced bill. Existing approved I-140 petitions and pending adjustment applications generally carry vested expectations that Congress tends to grandfather, but there is no guarantee. This is precisely why anyone deep in the backlog should keep a parallel plan, not because the bill will pass, but because the political risk is now visible.

What should an Indian on H-1B do right now?

Do not panic, and do not quit anything. Build a cash runway of at least six to nine months of US living expenses so a sudden status loss never forces a fire-sale decision. Keep your passport, I-797 approvals, pay stubs and I-140 receipt organised. Understand your 60-day grace period if employment ends. Open or refresh a parallel immigration option, Canada Express Entry, the UK or Australia skilled routes, so you are not starting from zero if you ever need it. Diversify where your money sits across the US and India. None of this assumes the bill passes. It assumes you want optionality in a system that has just reminded everyone how fast the rules can be proposed to change.

Rakesh Sinha, NRI Finance Writer

Rakesh Sinha is a technology professional and an NRI since 2016. He holds a master’s from Carnegie Mellon University and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Guwahati, and has worked at Microsoft, Cisco, InMobi and Google across Bengaluru, the United States and London. He has personally navigated the decisions these guides cover: moving foreign salary and tech-company RSUs across borders, opening NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts, filing Indian returns as a non-resident, and claiming DTAA relief between the US, UK and India. How these guides are written and reviewed.

Disclaimer: This guide is educational and general in nature. It is not individual financial, tax, or legal advice. Tax and FEMA rules change and your situation may differ, so confirm specifics with a qualified chartered accountant or financial adviser before acting. See our editorial standards for how these guides are researched, reviewed and updated.