United state of antipathy

The Right and Left converge in opposition to H-1B. Can the US afford to listen?

A controversy on H-1B visa holders (of which the major chunk are Indians) taking away American jobs is raging in the US. This is bothering educated Americans more than the illegal immigrants from Latin America (who take up mostly unskilled, low-paying jobs), though the number of undocumented immigrants entering the US each year is many times more than the legal H-1B workers. The political opinions of both the extreme right and the radical left are converging to the same conclusion.

However, this sentiment of Indians taking away well-paying American jobs is nothing new. In the early 2000s, I was teaching at a US university as a visiting professor. At the end of the course, when students fill out the course evaluation form, an American student wrote: “After outsourcing jobs to India, our university has now started importing cheap professors from India. This must stop in the interest of protecting our jobs.”

The student knew that I would read the evaluations. Yet, his dislike of Indian-imported “cheap” professors was so intense that he took the risk of stating his opinion.

A major plank of the Trump campaign was that, if elected, he would deport millions of illegal immigrants. Nothing was said about legal H-1B workers. Elon Musk who enjoys enormous influence in the present Trump administration is himself a beneficiary of the H-1B visa and a strong advocate of the H-1B path to citizenship.

But the extreme right in the Republican camp, represented by Steve Bannon (an influential Trump advisor in his earlier Presidency who has since fallen out of favour) and followers argues that H-1B should be a guest worker programme (like for Mexican workers) and should not provide a pathway to citizenship.

H-1B supporters would mention names of people like Elon Musk (a South African), Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella (both Indians) as examples of the “best and the brightest” who have become CEOs of top US companies and tech startups, creating jobs for Americans and helping the US retain its technological leadership, after getting citizenship through the H-1B route.

The extreme right-wing opponents would point to thousands of “diploma holders”, cooks and housekeepers who have also used the H-1B route to become US citizens and are certainly not the “best and the brightest”.

On the left, leaders like Bernie Sanders have openly joined the opposition to the programme, arguing that it provides US capitalists the opportunity to import cheap foreign labour and depress US wages which increases their profit and worsens the income and wealth distribution.

Moving jobs to India

What the opponents of the H-1B programme do not realise is that in its absence, American companies would be forced to shift a much larger part of their operations to countries like India to make use of the huge pool of high-quality engineers, scientists, and finance experts available at lower wages.

The process has already started with many well-known US tech and finance companies opening GCCs (Global Capability Centres) in India doing research, design, and innovation instead of outsourcing simple, low-value jobs to Indian companies as was the earlier practice.

If high-skilled Indians are not allowed to be US citizens by following the H-1B route, this process will be strengthened many times, shifting high-paying jobs from America to India. It would be a loss for the US and a corresponding gain for India. Similarly, if Indian doctors are not allowed to migrate to the US (or the UK for that matter), US hospitals (and the NHS in the UK) would face a crisis.

In some cases (especially in social media posts), the opposition to Indian H-1B workers is taking a racist colour with mention of the “curry smell”, and with Musk’s picture painted in black to make him ‘look’ like an Indian. This, probably, comes from the resentment of white American supremacists over the increasing influence of Indian-Americans in the ‘corridors of power’ in the present Trump administration – like billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge (along with Musk) of the high-profile Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (which oversees FBI, CIA, NSA), “Kash” Patel as FBI Director, Sriram Krishnan as AI advisor to the President, and many elected Indian-American governors, senators and House representatives. The Indian-American community in the US is also the ethnic community with the highest median per capita income.

The irony, of course, is that all Americans were immigrants at some point. But once someone becomes a citizen, he or she takes an anti-immigrant position, to prevent competition.

(The writer is a former professor of  economics, IIM, Calcutta, and Cornell University, US)