
America’s H-1B visa is vital to US interests—and suits India too

Summary
- The brouhaha in the US over Indian techies, who often enter via this visa, is misguided. The truth is that the US economy—its information technology industry especially—needs skilled workers from India.
Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the US presidential election was built on a blatant anti-immigrant agenda. The main targets of the vitriol were Latin American immigrants from Mexico and countries further south.
The secondary targets were immigrants from other Global South countries, those Trump had branded as “shithole" nations in his first term while lamenting a lack of “Norwegian" immigrants.
This is part of a larger ‘White nationalist’ agenda that includes efforts to rewrite the history and effects of slavery and roll back policies in favour of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The incoming administration is making noises about withdrawing the automatic citizenship right of anyone born in America and is engaged in a high-decibel argument about what to do about the immigration of skilled workers.
Also read: Indian IT services companies shed reliance on H-1B visas
In this crossfire, Indian immigrants are by far the most affected group. The instrument used to bring skilled workers into the US is the H-1B Visa, which allows highly educated foreign professionals to work in fields such as science, mathematics, engineering, technology and medicine.
The primary beneficiaries of this visa policy are Indians. In the early to mid-2000s, Indians comprised roughly half of all H-1B visa recipients. In 2023, they made up about 72% of the nearly 400,000 H-1B visa holders. About two-thirds of all H-1B visas are for computer-related professions.
It has mockingly been called the “outsourcing visa." Hundreds of thousands of one-time H-1B visa holders from India have gone on to acquire US permanent residency and citizenship.
In a 2016 book, The Other One Percent: Indians in America, Devesh Kapur, Nirvikar Singh and I had documented the H-1B Visa’s role in turning Indian immigration to the US from “a trickle to a torrent" starting in 1995.
Indian immigrants thus grew to 1% of the US population and became a “visible minority" in some parts of the country. Not only that, because these new arrivals were skilled and well paid, Indians became “the highest educated and highest earning group, immigrant or native in the US."
The rise of the IT industry also transformed India, its GDP, exports, labour force, higher education system (through the mushrooming of private engineering colleges) and urbanization (witness the growth of cities from Bengaluru to Cuttack).
Despite the stupendous growth of IT and IT-affiliated industries in the US, there is unease about foreign workers. Critics argue that immigrant IT workers “take jobs away from Americans" and that by working for lower wages, they undercut wages for the whole industry.
This argument—voiced with far more inflammatory rhetoric—is increasingly heard from the ‘White nationalist’ MAGA wing of the Republican party. That is to be expected.
But even liberal icons like Bernie Sanders (who many feel should have been the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016) make the same argument.
In a Fox News op-ed this week, he wrote: “The primary purpose of H-1B and other guest worker programs is not to employ the ‘best and the brightest,’ but instead to replace American workers with lower-paid workers from abroad who often live as indentured servants."
Also read: Mint Primer: How H-1B visas got caught in the MAGA debate
On the other hand, inside the Republican camp are billionaires like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (an immigrant and a child-of-immigrants respectively) who argue that the US simply does not produce enough skilled workers to meet the demand of a high-tech and innovation-driven economy.
Tesla, one of Musk’s firms, employs about 1,700 H-1B visa holders. Amazon, at the top of the list, employs 13,000. Some conservative H-1B supporters locate the source of this mismatch between demand and supply in American culture.
According to Ramaswamy, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers."
What is the truth? Do H-1B workers really work for lower wages and do they really take jobs away from Americans? The evidence strongly suggests that the answer to both questions is ‘no.’
On wages: in 2023, the average H-1B visa holder earned about $118,000, which is slightly more than the average US income in computer and mathematical jobs and almost twice as high as the US median household income.
It’s obvious that Indians in America would not have become the highest earning group if they weren’t well paid.
The allegation of ‘taking jobs away’ is also untenable. The IT sector has grown massively in the last three decades. Millions of new jobs have been created in IT. From the beginning of this explosive growth, there was a shortage of appropriate skilled labour in the US.
One could have expected the vast higher education system in the US to eventually produce enough skilled labour to match demand, but that hasn’t happened. Why it hasn’t happened is an interesting question that requires serious analysis, more than is feasible is this space.
But this we know: so large is the shortage that, by the mid-2010s, people born in India made up well over 10% of the American labour force in fields like computer science and engineering, and electrical engineering and technology.
It is possible that if IT labour had not been imported through the H-1B Visa, the education system in the US would at some point have been forced to produce enough skilled workers.
But in such a scenario, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla may not have been born at all, or not grown to what they have become, or may have been born outside the US. These alternative histories are fun to ponder but best left in the realm of fiction.
There is much to respect in the passion of Bernie Sanders on the ideological left and much to worry about the racism that drives the MAGA decriers of the H-1B programme (who would surely not have minded had H-1B workers been ‘Norwegian’).
Also read: Putting America first requires H-1B visa reform
But these strange bedfellows are both wrong. The US IT industry simply would not have become the behemoth it is without its foot soldiers, mostly Indian, imported through the H-1B programme.
The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.