What the 2024-2026 disclosure stack actually says. A three-stage decomposition of the funnel from F-1 enrolment to STEM-OPT, to H-1B, to the per-country employment-based green-card queue — read from primary U.S. and Indian government disclosures only.
India is again the leading place of origin for international students in the United States, in a total population of 1,177,766 (~1.2 million), itself up 5 percent year-over-year. IIE Open Doors 2025, released 17 November 2025. The headline. The next layers decompose the funnel beneath it.
Indian-origin high-skilled outflows to the United States are now legible from three independent reporting stacks: IIE Open Doors (enrolment), ICE/SEVIS (active status and post-completion work), and USCIS (H-1B and employment-based green-card pipelines). The three rarely agree on cohort sizes because each measures a different population at a different cut-date. This brief walks the disclosures and reconciles the gap.
We work only from primary U.S. and Indian government disclosures: IIE Open Doors 2025 / AY 2024-25 (released 17 Nov 2025), the ICE/SEVP 2024 SEVIS by the Numbers report (released June 2025, calendar-year data), the USCIS Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers FY24 report to Congress, the U.S. Department of State May 2026 Visa Bulletin (Number 14, Volume XI, dated 2 April 2026), and the Ministry of External Affairs Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 894 (26 July 2024). Each quantitative figure is paired with a verbatim disclosure quote in the companion RECEIPTS.md.
IIE Open Doors 2025 / AY 2024-25 (released 17 November 2025) confirms India is once again the leading place of origin for international students in the U.S., with 363,019 Indian students in academic year 2024/25, a 10% increase from the prior year. The total U.S. international-student population reached 1,177,766 (≈1.2 million), up 5% year-over-year.
This is consistent with India's own outbound count. The Ministry of External Affairs, answering Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 894 on 26 July 2024, reported 337,630 Indian students in the United States in the 2024 reference period (MEA Annexure-A). The ~25k delta between MEA (337,630) and IIE (363,019) is explained by reporting cut-dates, definitional differences (MEA counts Indian-passport students; IIE counts students of Indian origin enrolled at SEVP-certified institutions in AY 2024/25), and one calendar-year of enrolment growth.
The ICE SEVIS stack measures a separate population: active F-1/M-1 records. The 2024 SEVIS by the Numbers report (released June 2025) reports 1,582,808 total active F-1/M-1 records in calendar year 2024, up 5.3% from CY2023. This is broader than IIE — it includes K-12, language schools, and visiting-scholar populations IIE excludes.
The three numbers do not contradict. They measure three different things.
Optional Practical Training (OPT) is the first stop — 12 months of post-completion work authorization for F-1 graduates. ICE SEVIS CY2024 records 194,554 foreign students obtaining work authorization through OPT (+21% YoY). Of these, students with STEM-qualifying degrees can apply for a 24-month extension: 95,384 STEM-OPT authorizations in CY2024 (+54% YoY). The participating-population view is a different ICE measure: 165,524 foreign students participating in STEM OPT in 2024, of whom India accounted for 48.0% and China 20.4% (verbatim from ICE SEVIS 2024). The 48.0% India share applies to participants, not to the 95,384 new-authorization count.
The next gate is H-1B. The USCIS Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers FY24 report (Section 2.3) states: "Of the H-1B petitions approved in FY 2024, 71 percent were for beneficiaries whose country of birth was India." That works out to 283,397 Indian-born H-1B beneficiaries approved in FY24 (Table referenced). The second-ranked origin, China, accounts for ~12 percent.
The USCIS report also discloses median annual compensation for all approved H-1B beneficiaries in FY 2024 was $120,000. Computer-related occupations accounted for 64% of all approvals (255,250 beneficiaries, 63.9%), with the next-largest group — architecture, engineering, and surveying — at 10%.
The conversion ratio from the STEM-OPT cohort to H-1B beneficiary is structurally capped by the annual statutory cap on cap-subject H-1B petitions — the exact FY26 cap-allocation count is published separately by USCIS and is outside this brief's verified-disclosure stack.
The third stage — permanent residency — is where the funnel meaningfully constricts for the Indian-born cohort due to the per-country cap.
The U.S. Department of State Visa Bulletin Number 14, Volume XI, dated 2 April 2026 (for May 2026) lists the Employment-Based Final Action Dates for India as:
These dates have not moved from the prior month's bulletin. The interpretation is straightforward: an Indian-born EB-2 beneficiary whose I-140 priority date is after 15 July 2014 is, as of the May 2026 bulletin, ineligible for I-485 adjustment-of-status approval. The retrogression gap — roughly 11.8 years for EB-2 India and 12.5 years for EB-3 India relative to the bulletin month — is the structural consequence of the 7%-per-country cap interacting with the FY24-onward Indian-origin demand stack.
NAFSA reports total international-student economic contribution to the U.S. economy at $43.8 billion in academic year 2023-24 (NAFSA International Student Economic Value, released 18 November 2024), supporting more than 378,000 jobs. Per-country contribution is not separately disclosed.
Cap-subject H-1B and EB-2/EB-3 are the two binding constraints that determine throughput from the 363,019-student stock to the green-card stage.
The three measurement stacks are coherent once read against their own cut-dates. Each disclosure measures a different population at a different moment; together they describe one underlying outflow.
| Publisher · cut-date | Number | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| IIE Open Doors AY 2024/25 · released 17 Nov 2025 |
363,019 Indian students |
The enrolment figure — students of Indian origin enrolled at SEVP-certified institutions in academic year 2024/25. |
| MEA Lok Sabha Q.894 26 Jul 2024 |
337,630 Indian passport students |
The outbound passport figure — six months earlier cut-date, Indian-passport basis. |
| ICE SEVIS CY 2024 · released June 2025 |
1,582,808 total active F-1/M-1 |
The active-status figure across all nationalities. Plus 95,384 STEM-OPT new authorizations and 165,524 STEM-OPT participants of whom India 48.0%. |
| USCIS H-1B FY24 report to Congress |
71% / 283,397 Indian-born approvals |
The specialty-occupation funnel figure — $120,000 median annual compensation across all approved H-1B beneficiaries FY 2024. |
| DoS Visa Bulletin No. 14, Vol. XI · 2 Apr 2026 · for May 2026 |
15 JUL 2014 · 15 NOV 2013 EB-2 · EB-3 India cut-offs |
The permanent-residency throughput figure — the 7-percent-per-country cap binding on Indian-born EB-2 and EB-3 priority dates. |
The rule-change horizon 2020-2026 has compressed all three queues simultaneously: H-1B cap unchanged, per-country EB cap unchanged, but Indian-origin demand at the front of the funnel has grown ~10% year-over-year. The structural bottleneck is downstream of enrolment, not at the door.
This Mirror Brief does not allege any inaccuracy or methodological flaw in any of the five cited reports. IIE Open Doors, the ICE SEVIS by the Numbers report, the USCIS H-1B Characteristics report, the DoS Visa Bulletin, and the MEA Lok Sabha answer each disclose accurately and completely under their own conventions. The Mirror Brief adds only the cross-publisher decomposition that no single disclosure publishes on its own.
All figures in this brief are anchored to publisher-verified disclosures with verbatim quotes in the companion file RECEIPTS.md. Each row below is the originating publisher; full URLs and per-figure verbatim quotes are in RECEIPTS.md. All documents remain the intellectual property of their respective publishers; this brief reproduces no exhibits and excerpts no extended prose.
This brief is the third in the RAOSCAFF Student-Abroad Mirror Series. It decomposes the Indian-origin student-to-permanent-resident funnel in the United States across three stages — enrolment, post-graduation work-authorization, and permanent residency — using only primary U.S. and Indian government disclosures published between July 2024 and April 2026. The decomposition window spans AY 2024/25 enrolment, CY 2024 active-status and OPT data, FY 2024 H-1B data, and the May 2026 Visa Bulletin.
Every figure in this brief is paired with a verbatim publisher quote in the companion file RECEIPTS.md. Primary publishers: IIE Open Doors 2025 (17 Nov 2025), ICE/SEVP 2024 SEVIS by the Numbers (Jun 2025, CY-2024 data), USCIS Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers FY24 (Section 2.3 and Section 2.6), U.S. Department of State Visa Bulletin Number 14, Volume XI, dated 2 April 2026 (for May 2026), Ministry of External Affairs Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 894 (26 Jul 2024), NAFSA International Student Economic Value (18 Nov 2024), UGC CCFUP notification (12 Dec 2022), and WES World Education Services policy research. The brief introduces no additional dataset, imputes no missing values, and adjusts no published headline.
The three independent stacks (IIE 363,019 · MEA 337,630 · ICE SEVIS 1,582,808) are not reconciled to a single number; each is reported on its own cut-date and against its own definitional universe. The roughly 25,000-student delta between IIE and MEA is attributed by the brief to (a) reporting cut-date difference of approximately six months, (b) the IIE Indian-origin-at-SEVP-institution definition versus the MEA Indian-passport definition, and (c) one calendar-year of enrolment growth. The work-visa funnel is presented as sequential gates (OPT → STEM-OPT → H-1B) with the explicit preservation of the ICE SEVIS distinction between 95,384 CY 2024 STEM-OPT new authorizations and 165,524 CY 2024 STEM-OPT participants — these are two different measurements of the same program in the same calendar year. The retrogression gap (11.8 years EB-2 India; 12.5 years EB-3 India) is computed as the elapsed-time difference between the May 2026 bulletin month and the Final Action Date for each category, both of which appear verbatim in the bulletin.
The brief does not estimate the exact FY26 H-1B cap-allocation count, which is published separately by USCIS outside this brief's verified-disclosure stack. It does not provide per-state, per-employer, or per-university decomposition of the 363,019-student stock — the cited disclosures do not publish at that granularity in the same release. NAFSA's $43.8-billion 2023-24 contribution figure is not separately disclosed at per-country level; the brief does not impute an Indian-cohort share. The brief takes no position on prospective Visa Bulletin movement, prospective H-1B policy change, or prospective per-country-cap reform. Any cited figure used for individual enrolment, work-authorization, or permanent-residency strategy should be cross-verified against the originating publisher's full disclosure.
This brief is analytical commentary on publicly-available U.S. and Indian government disclosures and institutional research. It does not allege any inaccuracy or methodological flaw in the cited reports, does not advise any individual or institution on enrolment, work-visa, or permanent-residency strategy, and does not forecast future visa-bulletin movement or H-1B policy. IIE Open Doors, the ICE SEVIS report, the USCIS H-1B report, the DoS Visa Bulletin, and the MEA answer remain the canonical sources for their respective measurements. The Mirror Brief adds only the cross-publisher cohort decomposition that no single disclosure publishes on its own.
In plain terms
This Mirror Brief, the third in the Student-Abroad series, decomposes the Indian-origin student-to-permanent-resident funnel in the United States. It reads five primary disclosures — IIE Open Doors 2025, ICE SEVIS 2024, USCIS H-1B FY24, the DoS May 2026 Visa Bulletin, and the MEA Lok Sabha answer — against each other to show why the same broad outflow is counted differently by each publisher, and where the funnel narrows.