AFPAshish Chauhan describes his purpose as being” stamped in his mind” as wanting to study for an MBA at an American universities next time.
The 29-year-old finance professional from India (whose name has been changed on request) hopes to eventually work in the US, but says he now feels conflicted amid an immigration row sparked by President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters over a long-standing US visa programme.
H-1B card, which brings highly qualified foreign employees to the US, is criticized for undermining American workers but is praised for attracting international ability. The president-elect, after a writer, now supports the 34-year-old project, while it tycoon Elon Musk defends it as vital to securing best engineering talent.
Indian nationals like Mr Chauhan dominate the programme, receiving 72 % of H-1B visas, followed by 12 % for Chinese citizens. The majority of H-1B visa holders worked in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, with 65 % in computer-related jobs, in 2023. Their median annual salary was$ 118, 000 ( £94, 000 ).
H-1B permits are incontrovertible in terms of broader immigration conversations.
A Pew Research report shows that US immigration rose by 1.6 million in 2023, the largest increase in more than 20 years. Immigrants now comprise over 14% of the population – the highest since 1910. Indians are the second-largest immigrant group – after Mexicans – in the US. Many Americans fear this surge in immigration could harm job prospects or hinder assimilation.
India has also surpassed China as the leading source of international students, with a record 331,602 Indian students in the US in 2023-2024, according to the latest Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Most rely on loans, and any visa freeze could potentially devastate family finances.
” My worry is that this]resistance to H-1B visas ] could also spark animosity towards the Indians living there. However, because it’s been this for years, I didn’t garden my passions, put my life on keep, and wait for the volatility to subside,” says Mr. Chauhan.
Efforts to restrict the H-1B program peaked under Trump’s first word, when he signed a 2017 get increasing program attention and fraud monitoring. Rejection rates soared to 24 % in 2018, compared to 5-8 % under President Barack Obama and 2-4 % under President Joe Biden. Under Biden, there were still about half as many H-1B candidates as there were during Trump’s first word.
” The first Trump administration made H-1B visas more difficult for people to obtain in time by lowering rejection rates and stifling processing times. It is questionable whether that may happen again in the following Trump supervision”, Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration professor at Cornell Law School, told the BBC.
Elon Musk and other figures in the new leadership want to halt all immigration, including H-1Bs, while others want to keep the H-1B visa. It is too early to predict which side did win.
Indians and the H-1B card have a long marriage. According to the authors of The Other One Percent, a research on Indians in America, the program is also the cause of the “rise of Indian-Americans into the highest educated and highest earning party, expat or indigenous in the US.”
Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh, experts from the US, noted that fresh Indian immigrants had different cultures and lived in different locations than previous immigrants. Indian-American areas shifted from New York and Michigan to larger regions in California and New Jersey as the number of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu speakers increased. The experienced visa programme helped make a “new image of Indian-Americans”.
According to Mr. Chauhan, the biggest benefit of H-1B visas is the ability to earn substantially higher salaries. The US offers higher pay, and for someone who is the first in their home to obtain professional credentials, earning that little can be life-changing. He claims that the interest in H-1Bs is immediately related to the salary difference between India and the US for the same executive positions.
But not everybody is delighted with the project. Some people look to the H-1B program for a path toward becoming permanent residents or earning a US green card. H-1B is a temporary work visa, but it also allows buyers of visas to reside and work in the US for up to six times. During this time, some H-1B buyers apply for a green card through employment-based immigration groups, usually sponsored by their companies. This takes time.
More than a million Indians, including dependents, are currently waiting in employment-based green card categories. Atal Agarwal, the owner of a business in India that uses AI to assist people seeking visas for education and employment, says,” Getting a green card means signing up for an endless wait for 20 to 30 years.”
After graduating in 2017, Mr. Agarwal relocated to the US and spent some time working for a software company. He says getting the H-1B visa was fairly straightforward, but then it seemed he had “reached a dead end”. He returned to India.
” It’s an unstable situation. You are essentially tied to your employer because they must sponsor you and the green card process is so lengthy. You only have 60 days to find a new job if you lose it. Every applicant for merit admission to the US should have a pathway to a green card in the next three to five years.
This might be one explanation for how immigration has become entangled in the visa program. “H-1B is a high-skilled, worker mobility visa. It is not a visa for immigration. However, immigration and illegal immigration cause it to become a sensitive issue, according to Shivendra Singh, vice president of global trade development at Nasscom, the trade group for the Indian technology industry.
Many in the US believe the H-1B visa programme is flawed. They cite widespread fraud and abuse, especially by major Indian IT firms which are top recipients of these visas. In October, a US court found Cognizant guilty of discriminating against over 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022, though the company plans to appeal. Last week, Farah Stockman of The New York Times wrote that “for more than a decade, Americans working in the tech industry have been systematically laid off and replaced by cheaper H-1B visa holders”.
According to Mr. Chowdhury of Nasscom, H-1B visa workers are not underpaid, with median wages that are more than twice the US median. For these pricey visas, companies also invest tens of thousands of dollars in legal and government costs.
Also, it has not been a one-way traffic: Indian tech giants have hired and supported nearly 600, 000 American workers and spent over a billion dollars on upskilling nearly three million students across 130 US colleges, according to Mr Singh. The Indian tech sector has given the hiring of US workers a priority, he said, and only applies to employees who are unable to locate locals with the skills they need.
As Trump prepares to take office later this month, India is working to make sure the H-1B visa program is secure. The mobility of skilled professionals is a key component of our countries ‘ economic and technological partnership, according to India’s foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal, who spoke to journalists last week.
What should American students who want to work in the US do then? It will take time to implement any immigration changes in the US. Students should pick the best college possible for them. With good immigration counsel, they will be able to figure out what to do”, says Mr Yale-Loehr.
For the time being, despite the political unrest in the US, students are determined to pursue the American dream, and Indian interest in H-1B visas is still strong.