Washington has spent the past year making it harder, pricier and more nerve-racking for foreign talent to work in America. Asian founders, if a new survey is to be believed, have mostly shrugged.
Singapore-founded immigration platform Beyond Border’s August 2026 Founder Mobility Pulse found that 82 per cent of respondents had not changed their US expansion plans despite immigration uncertainty. Another 11 per cent were either bringing their timelines forward or exploring other visa routes.
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On its face, that is a show of founder grit. It also comes from a company whose business is helping founders get US visas, which is worth keeping in mind before anyone treats it as a verdict on the whole region.
Customers, not capital
The headline motivation is commercial. Some 85 per cent of the 307 founders surveyed, more than 200 of them based in Asia, said access to US customers was their main reason for expanding. Only 8 per cent pointed to fundraising or investor networks, with talent and partners (5 per cent) and compliance (2 per cent) trailing.
The timelines are aggressive. Sixty per cent plan to land in the US within 12 months and a further 25 per cent within two years.
That customer-first logic makes sense, but the sample explains part of it. Roughly 83 per cent of respondents are at seed (35 per cent), bootstrapped (28 per cent) or pre-seed (20 per cent). Only 5 per cent have reached Series B or beyond.
Companies that have never raised institutional money are unlikely to cross the Pacific for American VCs. For them, the US is a sales territory, not a cap table strategy. Singapore’s MetaOptics, which is eyeing the US with a potential US$10 million warrant facility, is closer to the later-stage exception than the survey’s typical respondent.
A crackdown that hits some doors harder than others
The policy backdrop is not subtle. Late in August, the Trump administration proposed a US$103,265 annual fee for new H-1B visas, following an earlier US$100,000 fee that a court struck down. The report also notes recent moves affecting green-card sponsorship at major tech companies and investigations into university visa programmes.
Beyond Border’s reading of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data suggests the squeeze is uneven. Between FY2022 and FY2024, approved L-1 petitions, the route companies use to transfer staff, fell 31 per cent, while O-1/O-2 approvals for people with “extraordinary ability” rose 1 per cent. Between FY2023 and FY2025, EB-1A green-card approvals climbed 20 per cent, while EB-2 National Interest Waiver (NIW) approvals fell 39 per cent.
There are two caveats. The comparison windows differ by pathway, and none of the series fully captures the latest round of tightening. Approval counts also measure what the government granted, not what founders wanted.
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Then there is the inquiry data. Beyond Border analysed 1,140 immigration inquiries from Asia-based individuals between August 2025 and September 2026 and found that about 45 per cent (510) concerned the O-1 visa. That is a useful signal, but O-1, EB-1A and EB-2 NIW are also the pathways Beyond Border says it specialises in. A platform built around a visa will attract inquiries about that visa. e27 has previously explored why Beyond Border sees visas as part of the founder playbook; this survey is, in part, an extension of that pitch.
The founder as a one-person beachhead
The most telling finding concerns who actually makes the move. Thirty-five per cent expect the founder to relocate alone, and 29 per cent expect the founder to go with a small launch team. Only 16 per cent plan to put a US-based hire on the ground instead.
That is lean, and potentially punishing. A founder who sells in New York by day while managing a team in Jakarta or Bengaluru by night is running two companies across a 12-hour time difference. The report raises the right question but leaves it unanswered: when does a founder-led foothold need to become a real local operation? Anyone who has faced cross-border due diligence questions will know that American buyers and investors eventually expect more than one person and a co-working desk.
Asia keeps the engine room
For Southeast Asia, the more consequential number may be 72 per cent: the share of founders who intend to keep engineering and product in Asia. Many also plan to keep operations (40 per cent), sales and marketing (30 per cent) and senior leadership (20 per cent) in the region.
That supports the region’s engineering employers, but it also highlights an old pattern. When customers and revenue are in the US while code is written in Asia, cost arbitrage often explains as much as talent strategy. It also adds pressure to a pipeline already under strain from AI, as the junior developer dilemma makes clear.
The returnee numbers are real, but modest
The report’s final section looks at talent flowing the other way. Recruitment firm Xpheno estimates that 12,700 white-collar tech professionals returned to India from the US in the first nine months of 2026, compared with 15,100 in all of 2025, 9,800 in 2024 and 7,200 in 2023. At the current pace, 2026 would come in at around 17,000, which is a rise but not an exodus.
For scale, the US National Science Board says India and China accounted for 29 per cent and 12 per cent respectively of foreign-born workers in US science and engineering occupations in 2024. Beyond Border acknowledges that this says nothing about how many might actually leave.
The report names Singapore as a potential beneficiary. That is plausible, but returning talent has a habit of leaving again. Vietnam has already discovered that keeping returning engineers is harder than attracting them.
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Beyond Border’s own conclusion is the most defensible line in the report: tighter US immigration policy alone will not bring talent back. Pay, career progression and serious work in fields such as AI will. On that front, the US still competes better than most of Asia, whatever happens to the visa fee.
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