Indians slam MAGA ‘war’ over H-1B skilled visas as ‘racist’

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KOLKATA, India – The so-called “civil war” among supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over H-1B visas this past week has sparked a sharp reaction and accusations of racism by commentators in India, where these visas for skilled workers are in high demand.

Newspaper columns and social media posts decried what they characterized as a “racist” backlash against legal Indian workers in the American high-tech industry, following criticism of the visa program by far-right activists in the United States, such as Laura Loomer.

“The rising power, wealth, and visibility of Indian-Americans made it perhaps inevitable that the nativist base would direct its anger at the Desi [Indian] community. What Loomer and her ilk have done is open the floodgates for this anti-Indian racism,” said an article in the Hindustan Times.

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In its Saturday editorial, the English-language daily Deccan Herald slammed Trump’s supporters for not recognizing foreign contributions to the U.S. economy.

“They respond to the call to make America great without, ironically, realising that it was the foreign talent at work in the US that had once made America great,” said the paper, which is distributed in southern tech hubs such as Bangalore. “The H-1B visa is a tool and symbol of that idea.”

The Times of India and the Hindustan Times called the debate “a red-hot potato” and “a new chapter of racism against Indians” in their headlines and warned of its long-term implications for the relationship between the two countries. Digital news sites were less subdued and decried “America’s corrosive politics” for the “explosion of racism.”

For decades, the H-1B program has allowed hundreds of thousands of computer programmers and other high-skilled workers from India to work in the United States on a temporary basis. In 2023, Indians made up more than 70 percent of all H-1B workers, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

Critics of the program say it has failed in its original purpose of attracting the most highly skilled labor and is mainly used by tech companies to avoid hiring Americans in favor of lower-paid workers from abroad.

Trump adviser Elon Musk has heavily used the program for his companies and maintained that the United States does not produce enough skilled tech workers, prompting former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley to call on the tech industry to “invest in our education system.”

The issue even resonated with long-standing Trump opponents such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who railed against the program’s “widespread corporate abuse” last week.

Indian commentators on X responded by sneering at the shortage of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates in the United States. Several painstakingly dissected the American economy to show how the country needs to keep importing labor.

During a news briefing Friday, (Jan. 3) a spokesman from India’s Ministry of External Affairs said, “India-U.S. economic ties benefit a lot from the technical expertise provided by skilled professionals, with both sides leveraging their strengths and competitive value.”

The Indian government has seized on the export of skilled labor as a patriotic issue, portraying it as a source of rising Indian power on the global stage. Past Indian leaders once lamented this exodus as a brain drain.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally took up the cause of H-1B workers in multiple meetings with President Joe Biden during his term.

With Trump coming out in favor of the H-1B program, the controversy in itself is unlikely to cause major friction in the U.S.-Indian relationship in the short term. It does, however, reveal the growing belligerence among right-wing supporters of the respective administrations in the two countries and the shrinking space for nuance in discussions on complex issues such as immigration.

Tanul Thakur, a New Delhi-based independent journalist and author of a forthcoming book about the H-1B program titled “Wild Wild East,” rued the “woefully bad” media reporting on an issue that he insisted is economic, and not about civil rights.

“I am a brown guy and I was an H-1B worker for two years, so you can take it from me,” he said, criticizing the program for exploiting Indian IT workers with low-wage jobs compared to American employees.

Thakur said the visa system harms both American tech workers, who lose out on jobs, and Indian H-1B visa holders, who remain stuck in a relatively low-wage trap for years clinging to the hope of obtaining green cards. He chided the mainstream Indian news media, which used to be vocal about the “brain drain” until the late 2000s, for failing to get to the bottom of the issue because of its nationalist stance.

“Everything in the big newspapers and television channels on H-1B is largely about the image of India’s IT prowess because it is the biggest story from the last few decades that we like to tell ourselves,” Thakur said. “But like many stories, it is mired in self-deception.”

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