Shashidhar Nanjundaiah | Indian-American Dream: So near yet so far, amidst row on H-1B visas

If ever there was an uncertain time for Indian professionals to vie for the proverbial land of milk and honey, it is now. Democrats and Republicans have wedged away from each other more and more since Barack Obama’s presidency. After an initial bout of bickering, President-elect Donald Trump and his high-profile supporter Elon Musk seem to be on the same page, both defending work visas. On the other hand, a 2020 Trump administration executive order mandated migrant workers be paid more than locals, thus, according to Mr Trump, dissuading companies from hiring migrants. This time around, Mr Trump’s selection of a relatively recent immigrant, Sriram Krishnan, who arrived on a visa in 2007, as a senior adviser on artificial intelligence policy, triggered a vociferous debate: Mr Krishnan is a known advocate of removing caps on green cards, whereby permanent residency is granted. H-1B is a “non-immigrant” work visa with the pathway to apply for permanent residency, or immigrant status.

Dissenting voices on immigration are hardly new. The irony of illegal immigration is that rich white Americans, a core base of the Republicans, have forever been criticised for employing illegals as domestic help. But these righteous protestations against illegal immigration find weak counters. This is notwithstanding the Biden administration’s swift retraction from its earlier ambiguity. Vice-president Kamala Harris’ 2021 exhortation to Guatemalans, “Don’t come!”, indicating that her administration was trying to find solutions in home countries of the millions of potential refugees rather than encouraging them to find asylum at the US borders, reflects a knee-jerk and unconvincing stand that runs counter to the visually alarming “sanctuary cities”. Such has been the impact of sanctuary cities like Chicago and New York, which welcome illegal immigrants (kindly referred to as “undocumented workers”), that we seem to be at a decisive moment, marked by the return of Mr Trump to “drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again”. But a Cato Institute report in 2021 showed Mr Trump’s ambivalence on the subject, observing that he reduced the number of legal, not illegal, immigrants.

The voices against legal immigration, too, are well-known. The discontent among local Americans was palpable in Mr Obama’s presidency and even before it. For Indians, the problem is intertwined with the fact that a large proportion of H-1B visas generated for Indian-owned companies, such as Infosys, TCS, HCLTech, Wipro, etc, are for Indians and not for locals.

When a foreign company invests in a country, locals expect it to generate jobs locally. The experience with Indian companies has been that the largest proportion of their workers are Indian migrants. This may not be unique to Indian companies. Therefore, discontent among locals should be seen as natural, and, so, too, its politicisation -- the political representation of popular anxiety. In recent years, Amazon, Google, Salesforce and others have also been hiring Indians -- even at the cost of replacing Americans -- or outsourcing work to India, adding fuel to the embers.

Whatever the impact on Mr Trump’s far-right supporters may be -- it is hard to imagine there are groups even further right than his core constituency -- the agreement between him and Elon Musk is good news for Indians, who made up 72.3 per cent of work visas in this year’s quota. In 2013, the proportion of Indians in the H-1B visa applications was lower, at 65.3 per cent. Although the allotted numbers (caps) have changed, the percentage for Indians has been steadily over 70 per cent since 2014.

This is not surprising: The application numbers from Indians dominated the space -- having exploded from 1.22 lakh in 2009 to 2.01 lakhs in 2013, 3.01 lakh in 2016 (the highest ever), and 2.79 lakhs in 2024. Meanwhile, the next highest numbers, from China, grew from around 22,000 in 2009 to around 35,000 in 2016 and 45,000 in 2023. In 2023, Indians got a whopping 72.3 per cent of all H-1B visas issued. Given the overwhelming numbers and the cap around 200,000, it is just arithmetic that the proportion of rejections is higher now.

We should expect a groundswell of protests over immigration trends on the ground to be tied to economic waves. The fear that foreigners take away local jobs in the face of high rates of unemployment is not only understandable, it is realistic. The problem with this argument, though, is that is appears dubious in the face of the unemployment rate, which, while marginally inching upward, is under historical average. The other motivation is political, and Mr Trump’s vocal criticism of immigrants seems to have hit home. He has now forewarned of his intention to “terminate every open border policy” of the Biden administration. That is why his newfound love for H-1B visas is a perplexing, albeit quintessentially Trump-ian, volte face.

Just as Mr Trump is pivoting on immigration stands based on perceived trends on the ground, a triumphant Indian media has made H-1B its front-page headlines for many days over the past few weeks, unprecedently so. A section of the Indian media has claimed Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have successfully negotiated the H-1B visa situation during his Washington visit, while the Opposition blames the trend on unemployment and authoritarianism. While it may look initially counter-intuitive to the brain-drain theory, this jubilation around Indians migrating out is understandable, albeit understated: Migrant workers hold immense economic potential, an inference we may draw from the fact that India consistently tops foreign remittances – people living abroad sending money -- among all nations. As much as $129 billion was received in 2024, a record for any nation any year.

Much happens in the Washington lobby corridors that remains under the radar. If rumours about why Mr Krishnan was chosen are true, and if he gets his way to vicariously ease the way for foreigners bagging plum jobs, Indians would benefit the most.