Rahul Shivu Mahadev attended a Diwali celebration just before the election. The Indian-born software engineer, who lives in Santa Clara, sees the annual Festival of Lights as a way to connect with his community, sharing dishes like palak paneer, playing board games, and listening to Indian music.
But as the partygoers made small talk, the specter of Donald Trump assuming the White House loomed. For the attendees — largely foreign nationals with work visas employed by tech companies — anxiety over the tenuous nature of their immigration status permeated the casual catch-up.
Mahadev is on an H-1B visa, designated for foreign workers in specialty occupations. California has the most H-1B workers in the U.S., with more than 100,000 in fiscal 2022. When Mahadev won the lottery for a permit in 2019, he was ecstatic.
“Working in Silicon Valley is the absolute best place for me,” Mahadev said. “The H-1B allows me to live my dreams.” At the same time, Mahadev said, his temporary visa status has made him face the fact that his life in the U.S. is provisional.
“We buy furniture that can be sold quickly if we have to leave the country,” he said of visa holders. “We don’t have any property.”
The uncertainty and bureaucratic frustration have only heightened with Trump’s reelection.
During his last term, Trump launched a multi-pronged attack on the H-1B program, trying to limit eligibility for the visa and require companies to pay visa holders higher salaries than U.S. citizens. The proposals were blocked in court but threatened the highly skilled workforce that is part of the backbone of Silicon Valley.
Many foreign-born techies hope this time will be different, due in no small part to the close alliance between Trump and foreign-born billionaire Elon Musk.
The theory goes that Trump, now surrounded by a coterie of tech industry influencers, can be convinced to preserve — and maybe even improve — the legal pathways for highly skilled workers immigrating to the United States, even as he launches a mass effort to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
“You should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in the country,” Trump said during a June appearance on the “All-In” podcast, giving a ray of hope to half a million H-1B holders and more than 1 million international students in the U.S.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s campaign this time was boosted and bankrolled by tech leaders like Musk, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya — all of whom were born outside the United States and have relied on foreign high-skilled workers to build their companies and formidable wealth.
Trump has said that in his second term, he’ll allow companies “to import the best and brightest around the world to America” and acknowledged that in the current system, graduates of U.S. universities are going back to India and China and becoming “multibillionaires employing thousands and thousands of people.”
“That is going to end on Day One,” Trump said on the podcast, to which Palihapitiya responded, “That’s fantastic.”
Trump’s campaign later walked back his promise to give all foreign college graduates a green card with their diploma. Nonetheless, his comments inspired hope that he would reverse course on policies implemented during his first term, when the H-1B visa denial rate shot up.
‘Who is he going to listen to?’
Sameer Khedekar, an immigration lawyer based in Palo Alto, characterized Trump’s first term as a “nightmare” for his clients. “The administration made it very difficult and scary and chaotic, even within the legal immigration H-1B community,” Khedekar said.
A similar anxiety pervaded the leadup to the recent election.
Mantek Singh, a machine learning engineer in the Bay Area, was closely watching despite not being able to vote, because he doesn’t trust Trump’s track record on legal immigration. Singh plans to apply for an extraordinary ability visa to get in line for a green card for permanent residency.
“Are the rules going to be so stringent that my visa is going to get denied, when it would’ve been accepted if Harris was in office?” Singh asked. “Will I be stuck in the queue forever to get a green card?”
More than 1.2 million Indians are waiting for employment-based green cards, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. The waiting period can be decades; some projections suggest it could take nearly two centuries to clear the backlog without reform.
Now, some are looking to Trump and Musk to help with the logjam.
“There’s a large segment of the immigration community that is actually hopeful and thinks that because of Elon’s influence, [Trump’s presidency] is going to be really good,” Khedekar said.
Atal Agarwal, founder of OpenSphere, an AI assistant that helps people get visas, has been fielding calls since the election. “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have talked about the importance of legal immigration,” Agarwal has been telling concerned H-1B holders. “The hope is that Trump listens to them and fixes the system.”
Musk, while being rabidly against illegal immigration despite working in the U.S. illegally early in his career, has argued that the country should open its arms to immigrants who are “productive and honest and a net contributor.”
“The legal immigration process in America needs to be greatly streamlined and expanded, while illegal should be shut down,” Musk wrote on X in September. “If someone is talented, hard-working, and honest, they are an asset to the country.”
Last month, Musk returned to the same topic. “We have an upside down system that makes it hard for highly talented people to come to America legally, but trivial for criminals to come here illegally,” he said. “Why is easier to get in illegally as a murderer than legally as a Nobel Laureate?” Musk added that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency will fix this problem.
We have an upside down system that makes it hard for highly talented people to come to America legally, but trivial for criminals to come here illegally.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2024
Why is easier to get in illegally as a murderer than legally as a Nobel Laureate?@realDonaldTrump & DOGE will fix this. https://t.co/RgMGWeyX1X
But Kelli Duehning, partner at immigration law firm BAL, is skeptical about how much influence Musk will have to reform the system, especially as Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy during his first term, is expected to be appointed as deputy chief of staff for policy.
“The battle President Trump is going to face is, who is he going to listen to?” said Duehning.
She believes that if Miller prevails, Trump’s legal immigration policy will be a continuation of his first term. Highly skilled workers likely won’t be subject to mass deportation, she said, but the strategy will be to “throw sand in the gears” to slow legal immigration.
For example, Duehning anticipates that there will be little attempt to backfill positions at the State Department or Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Even more burdensome bureaucratic hurdles are precisely what Mahadev has been dreading.
Over the past few months, he’s had sleepless nights trying to navigate the clunky website H-1B holders use to book appointments at U.S. consulates abroad to get their visas stamped.
Slots are in short supply in India, leading to the formation of Whatsapp, Telegram, and Reddit communities with thousands of members dedicated to exchanging frustrations and advice. A black market has even cropped up in India of “visa agents” who will book appointments for a fee — and sometimes scam desperate overseas workers. A recent pilot program to allow visa holders to get a stamp stateside is no longer available.
“What I really want is for the temporary situation to not get worse, so we can visit our parents when we want to and travel freely,” Mahadev said.