 "The US is fundamentally changing its thinking on importing talent and services, and Trump’s steps are a manifestation of that change. Reuters")
Have you heard of Anna K Gorisch? Unlikely, unless you are on social media 24x7 like I am. Gorisch is an American national. She is an immigration attorney based in Texas, an accomplished professional, and a vocal commentator on American immigration law, particularly the H-1B visa programme for skilled workers.
I became interested in her posts on X (formerly Twitter) when she started busting fake news and explaining legal processes related to H1-B visas as the climate in the United States became increasingly hostile towards foreign workers under H1-B, the employment-based immigration programme where Indians account for more than 70% of approvals.
Ironically, Gorisch, a Trump supporter, has been a defender of Trump’s deportation policies and a public critic of Democrats’ approach to immigration. That didn’t save her from ugly backlash from Trump’s MAGA cult members and white nationalists. She has been subjected to targeted harassment for the ‘crime’ of battling misinformation, sharing stories of her clients, resisting racist stereotyping and advocating for legal immigration by pointing out that H-1B holders undergo thorough vetting, pay high taxes, and fill genuine skill gaps in technology where white American applicants often fall short.
For pushing back against anti-Indian racism online, the MAGA influencer ecosystem that identifies skilled Indian workers as “smelly job stealers”, “frauds”, and “invaders”, has torn into Gorisch. Her persecution has spilled from online harassment to real offline threats, doxxing, coordinated attacks, attempted cancellation and mental torture.
Gorisch’s tale is not an isolated one. Trump’s America is fast becoming an unwelcome place for Indians on H1-B visas in tech and STEM fields, and it isn’t just the decision to impose the hefty $100,000 fee on applications which the Trump administration claims is aimed at addressing “systemic abuse” and protecting American workers. Attitude towards immigration is hardening across the board, and hiring of foreign workers or outsourcing is facing a stiff nativist backlash.
Nearly 30 American lawmakers and politicians have publicly taken anti-H-1B positions, including calls to eliminate, reform, or limit the programme, and the list includes both Democrats and Republicans such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, senator Ted Cruz, Democrat Ro Khanna or Bernie Sanders. To put it in perspective, the letter urging Trump to “reset and repair” the relationship with India was signed by only 19 out of 435 members of the US House of Representatives.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsLeave alone illegal immigrants who have been subjected to mass deportations – often in chains and handcuffs – Trump in his second term has reimposed travel bans, targeting 19 countries, rolled back protection for asylum seekers and refugees, challenged the Constitutional tenet of birthright citizenship and has made it increasingly hard for applicants to get a visa, including enhanced vetting. This policy reorientation isn’t happening in a vacuum. The mood towards skilled workers is darkening in the US, and immigration is being framed as a threat to American jobs, way of life, national security, and even cultural identity.
If India is placing a bet that plugging the H1-B pipeline will inflict self-harm on America by drying up the talent pool to US industries and make it difficult for hospitals, banks, airlines or startups to be run, and may ultimately result in shortage of skilled labour in the US, this appears to be a risky punt at the moment. Human nature may be cyclical, but the arcs take a long time to swing back.
It’s not that the assumption is theoretically unsound or based on bad data. India is the single largest source of international medical graduates and Indian H1-B holders make up about 5-6% of US physicians without whom American medical sector will face severe doctor shortages, points out BBC.
If the pathway to working and eventually settling in America is taken away by way of tighter immigration rules, crackdown on US universities and visa restrictions, then American medical sector will suffer, start-ups will struggle and universities and colleges will struggle to attract students . That is already happening. Counsellors in India see a loss of interest among students in going to the US, and while nearly 20% fewer students travelled to America in August compared to last year, the number of Indians on student visas fell by a steep 44%.
And yet, to understand why the Trump administration is shutting the talent pipeline and subjecting its own industries and economy to severe stress test in order to keep out skilled foreign workers – majority of whom are Indians – and may end up stifling America’s innovation, leadership and dynamism in the long run, it is vital to understand the nature of the ‘America First’ movement characterized by economic nationalism, victimhood, grievance narrative and lack of strategic thinking.
On one hand, the US is fundamentally changing its thinking on importing talent and services, and Trump’s steps are a manifestation of that change. On the other, the Trump administration sees the world exclusively through the prism of economic competition, and in that framework India – whose service exports to the US were valued at $7.016 billion in December 2024 – is a rival and a ‘problem’ to be fixed.
As Ashley Tellis told Karan Thapar of The Wire, in the Trump administration the “problem is far more fundamental”. There’s “essentially an unwillingness to think strategically about US interests in the world. It’s an unwillingness to think about how India fits into those interests and it’s an unwillingness to appreciate what American presidents for 25 years have appreciated, which is that India is a very valued partner in order to advance US interests, let alone India’s interests.” Tellis thinks that it boils down to the fact that “there is no one in this administration at least at the very senior leadership levels, who gives the impression that they have a well-thought-out view of the world…”
Whether or not Trump’s views about the world are ‘well thought out’, whether or not India is collateral damage as Trump seeks to plug global talent flows to prioritise American workers, and whether or not these moves might have a broader impact on the US, the fact remains that America appears increasingly inhospitable for immigrants, and New Delhi’s model of ferrying skilled workers abroad as a means of remittance revenue and by way of ‘solving’ the problem of creating well-paying jobs is unsustainable, myopic and hazardous.
India may have its views about H1-B or labour mobility but a sovereign nation, even if it is taking an atavistic turn, is under no obligation to provide jobs to workers from other nations. Whether that’s a brain-dead move, or a justified approach, isn’t relevant for India.
It was mystifying therefore to observe the external affairs minister arguing in favour of labour mobility when the social reaction and policy prerogative in the US is overwhelmingly anti-immigration. Addressing an ORF event on the sidelines of UNGA in New York last month, S Jaishankar called for the creation of a “global workforce” that can be installed at a “global workspace”.
“Where that global workforce is to be housed and located may be a matter of a political debate. But there’s no getting away. If you look at demand and you look at demographics, demands cannot be met in many countries purely out of national demographics.”
India’s demographic advantage is well documented. But how practical is the plan to send off skilled or semi-skilled labour abroad, or create offshore workplaces or back offices for multinational companies in the form of Global Capability Centres (GCCs) to absorb the talent that’s returning home as US withdraws the drawbridge?
Jaishankar framed it as a demand-supply issue, a reality that cannot be avoided. “You cannot run away from this reality. So how do we create a more acceptable, contemporary, efficient model of a global workforce, which is then located in a distributed, global workplace? I think this is a very big question today which the international economy has to address…”
How sustainable is this ‘reality’? As Indian students increasingly turn away from America as the route to entering US workforce looks precarious, India’s plan to become the world’s primary supplier of skilled workforce faces significant structural challenges that could undermine its viability, and ‘reverse migration’ won’t take off based on nationalist appeals alone unless both the hardware and software are in place.
India’s strategy is reliant on assumptions that increasingly look vulnerable. Over 65% of Indian population is under the 35-year bracket. India is expected to provide 24.3% of the world’s incremental workforce over the next decade. One significant vulnerability for India is Trump regime’s unpredictability and sheer ability to take decisions that militate against economic logic. What happens if Washington brings IT and outsourcing under the tariff ambit and slaps taxes on firms that are creating GCCs in India?
Such a bill is already doing the rounds. CNBC reports of the Halting International Relocation of Employment (HIRE) bill, introduced in the US Senate, that “seeks to impose a 25% tax on certain payments made to foreign companies for services consumed in America, a move that could impact Indian software exports significantly if enacted,” though experts are hopeful that it won’t pass in the current form.
Nevertheless, if enacted, such a legislation may wipe out much of India’s labour cost advantage and deal a body blow to India’s $283 billion IT industry. The US accounts for over 50-60% of India’s IT export revenue, and tariffs or taxes on exports or outsourcing may result in massive job losses and second order effects in the form of significant societal pressure and unrest. The Americans will bleed for sure, but India will suffer the deeper cut.
In a recent speech at JNU, the external affairs minister rightly pointed out that India’s rise will be driven by “three driving forces of demand, of demographics and of data” and “while this is naturally a domestic agenda, the foreign policy implications are to weigh the pros and cons of our choices.” He went on to add, “along with that, we have to create the ideas, the concepts, the terminology, the explanations and the narratives for the journey towards 2047.”
That’s a worthy goal. To achieve it, the most pressing question that Indian political leadership and policymakers must grapple with is, given the inability of Indian and American negotiators to find a “landing ground” on trade that respects India’s core concerns and red lines, how may India exploit the demographic dividend in a hostile environment without falling prey to Trump administration’s strategy of weaponizing everything?
The 50% tariffs show Trump is not averse to wielding the sanctions stick to get leverage on trade. New H1-B petitions will attract $100,000 fee for workers outside the US, wage thresholds are being raised to weed out entry-level and semi-skilled professionals, visa approvals are facing rigorous vetting, and to compound India’s problems, it suffers from a serious quality versus quantity issue.
As Hudson Institute’s Aparna Pande points out in GIS, India lags China in literacy rate (75% compared to 97%) and while “India produces up to 2 million engineering graduates, 70,000 doctors and 29,000 PhDs” per year, “surveys show that 95% of Indian engineers are unfit for software development roles and more than three-quarters lack basic spoken English skills essential in the knowledge economy.”
Lack of skill infrastructure is an even more serious problem with only 20% of the 600 million-strong labour force fitting the definition of “skilled”, compared to a global average of 80% in developed countries. Around 47% of Indian workers are underqualified for their jobs , and about 83% of India’s unemployed are youth.
The demographic dividend that India sees as its greatest asset could become a liability if millions of young people cannot find productive employment. IT exports now face an existential crisis from AI, that is automating routine tasks, reducing demand for medium-skilled jobs and already forcing wide-scale layoffs in major tech companies.
One such is TCS, the Mumbai-headquartered software giant, India’s biggest IT services company that announced in July that it will shed more than 12,000 jobs at middle and senior management levels reducing the firm’s workforce by 2%, according to a BBC report. According to World Bank, 7% of all jobs in India are at high risk of automation due to AI, significantly impacting the non-agricultural labour market.
It is not within the gamut of this column to provide a way to mitigate the risk of mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and redefinition of skill requirements that India is staring at – issues that are compounded by America’s inward turn. The answer must lie in capacity building for self-reliance but more specifically, aligning education and training with future industry needs. We don’t have a lot of time in our hands.
The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.