AFPAshish 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 conflicted among immigration order challenged by supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over a longstanding US visa program.
The H-1B visa program, which brings skilled foreign workers to the U.S., has faced criticism for undercutting 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.
Indian nationals like Mr. Chauhan dominate the program, receiving 72 percent of H-1B visas, followed by 12 percent for Chinese nationals. The majority of H-1B visa holders worked in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with 65% working in the computing field in 2023. Their average annual salary was $118,000 (£94,000).
Concerns about H-1B visas are tied to broader immigration debates.
A A Pew Research report shows US immigration to 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 highest share since 1910. Native Americans are the second largest immigrant group – after Mexicans – in the US. Many Americans fear that this influx of immigration could hurt job prospects or hinder assimilation.
India has also overtaken 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 House Report on international educational exchange. Most rely on loans, and any visa freeze could potentially ruin family finances.
“My concern is that this (resistance to H-1B visas) could also create hostility toward the Native Americans living there. But I can't park my ambitions, put my life on hold and wait for the volatility to subside because it has been like that for years now,” says Mr Chauhan.
Efforts to curtail the H-1B program peaked during Trump's first term, when he signed an executive order in 2017. to strengthen application verification and fraud detection. The rejection rate jumped 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 similar to Trump's first term.
“The first Trump administration tightened H-1B visas, increasing denial rates and slowing processing times, making it harder for people to get visas on time. It's unclear whether this will happen again under the second Trump administration,” Stephen Yale-Lohr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School, 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 is too early to say which side will prevail.”
Indians have a longstanding relationship with the H-1B visa. The program is also responsible for “elevating Native Americans into the highest-educated and highest-income group, either 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 Kapoor and Nirvikar Singh noted that new Indian immigrants speak different languages and live in different areas than earlier arrivals. The number of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu speakers grew, and Indian-American communities moved from New York and Michigan to larger clusters in California and New Jersey. The skilled visa program helped create a “new map of Indian Americans.”
The biggest appeal of H-1B visas is the ability to earn significantly higher wages, according to Mr. Chauhan. The US offers higher pay and for someone who is the first in their family to gain a professional qualification, earning that much can be life-changing. “The fascination with H-1B is directly related to the wage 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 an aspirational path to permanent residency or a green card in the US. 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. 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 dependents, are currently waiting in job-based green card categories. “Getting a green card means signing up for an endless wait of 20-30 years,” says Atal Agarwal, who runs a firm in India that uses AI to help find visa options globally for education and work .
Mr. Agarwal moved to the US after graduation in 2017. and worked in a software company for several years. He says that getting an H-1B visa was relatively easy, but then he seemed to “hit a dead end.” He returned to India.
“This is a volatile situation. Your employer must sponsor you, and since the path to a green card is so long, you are basically tied to them. If you lose your job, you only have 60 days to find a new one. Every person who goes to the United States on merit should have a path to a green card within three to five years.”
This may be one reason why the visa program is tied to immigration. “The H-1B is a highly skilled labor mobility visa. This is not an immigrant visa. But it is intertwined with 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 cite widespread fraud and abuse, particularly by large Indian IT firms, which are the 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, 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 laid off and replaced by holders of cheaper H-1B visas.”
Nasscom's Mr. Singh argued that H-1B visa workers are not underpaid because employers must pay them above the prevailing or actual wage of comparable American workers in the area. Companies also invest tens of thousands of dollars in legal and government fees for these expensive visas.
And the traffic has not been one-way: Indian tech giants have hired and supported nearly 600,000 American workers and spent more than $1 billion to upskill nearly three million students at 130 American colleges, according to Mr. Singh. India's tech industry prioritizes hiring workers from the U.S., and they hire workers on H-1B visas only when they can't find locals with the skills they need, he said.
India is working to ensure 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 that relationship,” India's foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told reporters last week.
So what should students who aspire to work in the US do? “Implementing any immigration changes in the US will take time. Students should choose the best college for them, wherever it may be. With good immigration advice, they will be able to figure out what to do,” says Mr Yale-Loehr.
For now, despite the political turmoil in the US, Indian interest in H-1B visas remains steadfast, with students determined to pursue the American dream.