Ashish Chauhan dreams of pursuing an MBA at an American university next year – a goal he describes as “imprinted in his brain”.
The 29-year-old financial professional from India (whose name has been changed upon request) hopes to eventually work in the U.S., but says he now feels torn between immigration order instigated by supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over the long-running US visa program.
The H-1B visa program, which brings skilled foreign workers to the US, has been criticized for the lower cost 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 critical to securing top engineering talent.
Indian nationals like Mr. Chauhan dominate the program, receiving 72% of H-1B visas, followed by 12% for Chinese nationals. 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).
Concerns about the H-1B visa are tied to broader immigration debates.
AND Pew Research report shows that US immigration will increase by 1.6 million in 2023, the largest increase in more than 20 years. Immigrants now make up over 14% of the population – the most since 1910. Native Americans are the second largest immigrant group – after Mexicans – in the US. Many Americans fear that this wave of immigration could hurt job prospects or prevent 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 Open Door Report on international educational exchange. Most rely on loans, and any visa freeze could destroy family finances.
“My concern is that this [resistance to H-1B visas] it can also create hostility towards the Indians who live there. But I can’t park my ambitions, put my life on hold and wait for the volatility to reduce because it has been like that for years,” says Mr Chauhan.
Efforts to limit the H-1B program peaked during Trump’s first term, when he signed an executive order in 2017 strengthening application controls and fraud detection. Rejection rates rose 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 applications under Biden remained similar to that of Trump’s first term.
“The first Trump administration tightened H-1B visas by increasing denial rates and slowing processing times, making it harder for people to get visas on time. It’s unclear whether that will happen again under the second Trump administration,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School , he told the BBC.
“Some people like Elon Musk want to preserve H-1B visas, while other officials in the new administration want to limit all immigration, including H-1B. It’s too early to tell which side will prevail.”
Indians have a long relationship with the H-1B visa. The program is also responsible for “the rise of Native Americans to become the most educated and highest-income group, immigrant or native-born, in the U.S.,” say the authors of The Other One Percent, a study of Native Americans in America.
US-based researchers Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh noted that the new Indian immigrants spoke different languages and lived in different areas than the earlier settlers. The number of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu speakers increased, 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.”
The biggest attraction of H-1B visas is the possibility of earning significantly higher salaries, according to Mr. Chauhan. The USA offers a higher salary, and for someone who is the first in his family to obtain professional qualifications, such earnings can be life-changing. “The allure of the H-1B is directly related to the pay gap between India and the US for the same engineering roles,” he says.
But not everyone is happy with the program. For many, the H-1B program is an aspirational path to permanent residency or a green card in the US. Although 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. During this time, many H-1B holders apply for a green card through employment-based immigration categories, usually sponsored by their employers. This takes time.
More than a million Indians, including dependent family members, are currently waiting in the 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 company in India that uses artificial intelligence to find visa options globally for education and work.
Mr. Agarwal moved to the US after graduating in 2017 and worked in a software company for several years. He says getting the H-1B visa was pretty straightforward, but then he seemed to “hit a dead end.” He returned to India.
“It’s a volatile situation. You have to be sponsored by an employer, and because the path to a green card is so long, you’re basically tied to them. If you lose your job, you only have 60 days to find a new one. would have a path to a green card within three to five years.”
This could be one of the reasons why the visa program is linked to immigration. “The H-1B is a highly skilled labor mobility visa. It’s not an immigration visa. But it gets burdened by immigration and illegal immigration and becomes 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 allege widespread fraud and abuse, especially by large Indian IT companies that are the biggest recipients of these visas. In October, a US court declared Cognizant guilty of discriminating against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022, although 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 technology industry have been systematically fired and replaced by holders of cheaper H-1B visas.”
Nasscom’s Mr. Chowdhury argues that H-1B visa workers are not underpaid, with their average wages more than double the US median. Companies also invest tens of thousands of dollars in legal and government fees for these expensive visas.
It wasn’t a one-way traffic, either: Indian tech giants hired and supported nearly 600,000 American workers and spent over $1 billion educating nearly three million students at 130 American colleges, according to Mr. Singh. India’s tech industry has prioritized hiring workers from the U.S. and only brings in H-1B workers when they can’t find locals with the skills they need, he said.
India is working to ensure that the H-1B visa program remains secure as Trump prepares to take office later this month. “Our countries share a strong and growing economic and technological partnership, and the mobility of skilled professionals is a vital component of this relationship,” Indian foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told reporters last week.
So what should students who want a job in the US do? “Implementation of any immigration changes in the US will take time. Students should choose the best college for them, wherever that may be. With a good immigration advisor, they will be able to figure out what to do,” says Mr. Yale-Loehr.
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.
