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AFPAshish Chauhan dreams of getting an MBA from an American university next year – a goal he describes as “implanted in his brain”.
The 29-year-old finance professional from India (whose name has been changed by request) hopes to eventually work in the U.S., but says he now feels conflicted about immigration row caused by supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over the long-standing US visa program.
The H-1B visa program, which brings skilled foreign workers to the US, has faced criticism for undercutting the value of American workers, but has been praised for attracting global talent. The president-elect, once a critic, now supports the 34-year-old program, while tech billionaire Elon Musk defends it as key to securing top engineering talent.
The program is dominated by Indian nationals like Mr. Chauhan, who receive 72% of H-1B visas, followed by 12% for Chinese nationals. In 2023, the majority of H-1B visa holders worked in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with 65% in computer-related jobs. Their average annual salary was US$118,000 (£94,000).
Concerns about H-1B visas are tied to the broader immigration debate.
A A report by Pew Research shows US immigration to rise by 1.6 million in 2023, the largest increase in more than 20 years. Immigrants now make up more than 14% of the population – the highest figure since 1910. Native Americans are the second largest immigrant group in the United States after Mexicans. Many Americans fear that this surge in immigration could hurt job prospects or hinder assimilation.
India 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 data The Open Door Report. on international educational exchange. Most rely on loans, and any visa freeze could potentially devastate family finances.
“My concern is that this (resistance to H-1B visas) could also create animosity towards the Indians who live there. But I can’t fix my ambitions, put my life on hold and wait for the volatility to subside because it has been like that for years,” says Mr Chauhan.
Efforts to limit the H-1B program reached their peak during Trump’s first term, when he signed an executive order in 2017 to strengthen application and fraud detection. Rejection rates soared to 24% in 2018, compared to 5-8% under President Barack Obama and 2-4% under President Joe Biden. The total number of approved H-1B applicants under Biden remained the same as during Trump’s first term.
“The first Trump administration tightened H-1B visas, increasing denials and slowing processing times, making it harder for people to get visas on time. It’s unclear whether this will happen again in a second Trump administration,” Stephen Yel-Leur, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School, told the BBC.
“Some people, like Elon Musk, want to keep H-1B visas, while other officials in the new administration want to limit all immigration, including H-1B. It is still too early to say which side will win.”
Indians have a longstanding relationship with the H-1B visa. The program is also responsible for “the elevation of Native Americans to the highest educational and income groups of both immigrant and native-born Americans,” say the authors of The Other One Percent’s study of Native Americans in America.
American researchers Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapoor and Nirvikar Singh noted that the new Indian immigrants spoke different languages and lived in different areas than the earlier arrivals. The number of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu speakers grew, and Indian-American communities moved from New York and Michigan to larger groups in California and New Jersey. The skilled visa program helped create a “new Indian map.”
According to Mr. Chauhan, the biggest attraction of H-1B visas is the opportunity to earn much higher salaries. Higher wages are offered in the US, and for someone who is the first in their family to obtain a professional qualification, such a salary can be life-changing. “The H-1B craze is directly related to the salary gap between India and the US for the same engineering positions,” he says.
But not everyone is happy with the program. For many, the H-1B program is a desire to obtain permanent residence or a US green card. While the H-1B itself is a temporary work visa, it allows visa holders to live and work in the US for up to six years. At this time, many H-1B holders apply for green cards through employment-based immigration categories that are usually sponsored by their employers. It takes time.
More than a million Indians, including dependents, are currently waiting in employment-based green card categories. “Getting a green card means signing up for an endless wait of 20 to 30 years,” says Atal Agarwal, who runs a firm in India that uses artificial intelligence to find visa options around the world for education and work.
Mr. Aggarwal moved to the US after graduation in 2017 and worked for a software company for several years. He says that getting the H-1B visa was pretty easy, but then it seemed like he “hit a dead end.” He returned to India.
“This is an unstable situation. Your employer has to sponsor you, and since the path to a green card is so long, you’re basically tied to it. If you lose your job, you only get 60 days to find a new one. Every person who goes to the United States for merits must receive a green card within three to five years.”
This may be one of the reasons that the visa program was linked to the immigration program. “The H-1B is a visa for highly skilled workers. This is not an immigrant visa. But it faces immigration and illegal immigration and is becoming a sensitive issue,” Shivendra Singh, vice-president of global trade development at Nasscom, India’s technology industry trade group, told the BBC.
Many in the US believe that the H-1B visa program is flawed. They cite widespread fraud and abuse, particularly by large Indian IT firms, which are the main recipients of these visas. In October, a US court recognized Cognizant guilty of discriminating against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022, although the company plans to appeal. Farah Stockman of The New York Times last week wrote that “for more than a decade, Americans working in the technology industry have been systematically laid off and replaced by holders of cheaper H-1B visas.”
Nasscom’s Mr Chowdhury claims that workers on H-1B visas are underpaid as their average salary is more than double the US average. Companies also invest tens of thousands of dollars in legal and government fees for these expensive visas.
Nor was it a one-way move: According to Mr. Singh, Indian tech giants have hired and supported nearly 600,000 American workers and spent more than $1 billion to train nearly three million students at 130 American colleges. India’s tech industry prefers to hire workers from the U.S., and they bring in workers on H-1B visas only when they can’t find locals with the skills they need, he said.
India is working to keep the H-1B visa program safe as Trump prepares to take office later this month. “Our countries share a strong and evolving economic and technological partnership, and the mobility of skilled professionals is a vital component of that relationship,” a spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry told reporters last week. Randhir Jaiswal.
So, what should students who want to get a job in the US do? “Implementation of any immigration changes in the US will take time. Students should choose the best college for themselves, wherever it may be. With a good immigration consultant, they will be able to understand what to do,” says Mr Yel-Leur.
For now, despite the political turbulence in the US, India’s interest in H-1B visas remains steadfast, and students are determined to pursue the American dream.
