Even before US President-elect Donald Trump took office, Indian professionals seeking job opportunities in the United States were already facing the heat of the raging debate over immigration and H-1B visa reforms. Several Indians have been hit by job offer withdrawals, visa delays and warnings of potential layoffs, with anxiety growing among professionals that the immigration debate could spark animosity towards Indians in the US, which could lead to hate crimes against them.
Mr Trump has pledged to introduce stricter immigration policies, with several of his supporters demanding a limit on the number of foreign professionals awarded H1-B visas, which permit technical workers from abroad to work in the US for three-year periods.
Anxieties Over Future Of H-1B Visa's Future
"My worry is that this [resistance to H-1B visas] could also spark animosity towards the Indians living there. But I can't park my ambitions, put my life on hold and wait for the volatility to subside because it's been like this for years now," Ashish Chauhan (whose name has been changed on request) said while talking to BBC.
Twenty-nine-year-old finance professional from India, Mr Chauhan dreams of pursuing an MBA at an American university next year and hopes to eventually work in the US.
The ambiguity over immigration politics during the Trump administration is also jeopardising the future of professionals, several of whom reported that their job offers were abruptly revoked due to "visa-related concerns".
Talking to the Times of India, Hyderabad-based software engineer V Puvvada (name changed) said that a US tech giant hired her in December. She had quit her current job and was preparing to move to San Francisco when her offer was revoked. ."I was offered the job in Dec 2024 and since I had a written confirmation, I resigned from my current job," she said.
The company told her that "changing visa dynamics" was the reason for withdrawing the offer.
"I feel cheated. Why offer a role when you're not sure about sponsoring the visa? They later said that they would issue my offer letter again when the whole discussion is settled and there is a concrete decision after Donald Trump assumes office. But how long can I wait?" she added.
The debate over the H-1B visa programme exposed the sharp divide between "tech right" Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and nationalist MAGA figures like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon. While MAGA advocates are criticising it for undercutting American workers, tech giant owners are praising it for attracting global talent.
President-elect Trump, who was once a critic, now supports the 34-year-old programme that Musk believes is key to securing top engineering talent.
Indian nationals like Mr Chauhan and Ms Puvvada dominate the programme, receiving 72 per cent of H-1B visas, followed by 12 per cent for Chinese citizens. The majority of H-1B visa holders worked in STEM fields like data science, AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity, with 65 per cent in computer-related jobs, in 2023. Their median annual salary was (about Rs 1.01 crore) annually.
Concerns over H-1B visas tie into broader immigration debates, with Indian professionals staring at an increasingly challenging environment.
Among them is Samaira Haji (name changed), a cybersecurity consultant in Los Angeles, who is facing delays in her H-1B visa sponsorship.
"Initially, the company promised to expedite the process (of sponsoring the H-1B). But now they claim they are 'waiting for clarity' on the potential visa reforms. The wait is agonising," she told TOI.
People who already have jobs and are working in the US are not feeling secure either. A software developer from Gujarat working in California shared his anxieties with TOI and said, "The management hasn't stated categorically if these layoffs are linked to visa issues, but the timing is suspicious."
"If we lose our job, we have to find another within 60 days to be able to continue staying here," he noted. But with unemployment at record levels and increasing uncertainties for Indian immigrants, finding a new job with H-1B sponsorship within such a short period would be difficult.
"It is terrifying to think that I could lose my job and my legal status in the US any moment," he said.
For many Indians, the H-1B programme is also an aspirational pathway for permanent residency or a green card in the US. While H-1B itself is a temporary work visa, it allows visa holders to live in the US for up to six years, during this time, many holders apply for a green card through employment-based immigration categories. But the wait for the approvals is also discouraging many people from pursuing the path.
"Getting a green card means signing up for an endless wait for 20-30 years," said Atal Agarwal, who runs a firm in India that uses AI to help find visa options globally for education and jobs.
Mr Agarwal moved to the US after graduating in 2017 and worked at a software company for a few years. He told BBC that getting the H-1B visa was fairly straightforward, but then it seemed he had "reached a dead end" and had returned to India.
"It's an unstable situation. Your employer has to sponsor you and since the pathway to a green card is so long, you are basically tied to them. If you lose your job, you only get 60 days to find a new one. Every person who is going on merit to the US should have a pathway to a green card within three to five years," he said.
"H-1B is a high-skilled, worker mobility visa. It is not an immigration visa. But it gets clubbed with immigration and illegal immigration and becomes a sensitive issue," Shivendra Singh, vice president of global trade development at Nasscom, the Indian technology industry trade group, told the BBC.
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