New Delhi, Sept. 28 -- This week, Donald Trump shook up the global talent playbook with his crackdown on migrant workforces-sending shockwaves through India, the single-biggest supplier of skilled workers to the US. Think of it this way: the US H1-B visa that powered Big Tech's rise, put Indians at the helm of trillion-dollar companies, and created icons like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, is now being priced almost out of reach.

You don't need to look very far to see how and why. Pichai helms Google, arguably the world's most influential internet company today. Nadella runs Microsoft, the $3.8-trillion global behemoth that powers most computers around the world. Aravind Krishna helms IBM, and Shantanu Narayen chairs Adobe. Earlier thi...