H-1B: Visa row fuels anxiety for Indians eyeing American dream

The biggest draw of H-1B visas is the opportunity to earn significantly higher salaries, according to Mr Chauhan. The US offers higher pay, and for someone who is the first in their family to achieve professional qualifications, earning that much can be life-changing. “The fascination with H-1Bs is directly tied to the wage gap between India and the US for the same engineering roles,” he says.

But not everybody is happy with the programme. For many, the H-1B programme is an aspirational pathway for permanent residency or a US green card. While 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, typically sponsored by their employers. This takes time.

More than a million Indians, including dependents, are currently waiting in employment-based green card categories. “Getting a green card means signing up for an endless wait for 20-30 years,” says 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 says getting the H-1B visa was fairly straightforward, but then it seemed he had “reached a dead end”. He 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.”

This could be one reason that the visa programme has got tied up with immigration. “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.