Visa woes | Trump or Biden, Indian immigration to US won’t drastically improve

For too long, the Indian Dream was the American Dream.

I addressed this concept in a TEDx talk in March 2019, where I said that for the aspirational classes of the 1990s, the notion was that you do well in school, in order to pursue a STEM degree, and then head on to a great grad school programme in the United States — everything else is secondary.

One would then be armed with intellectual arsenal to land a plump job in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, get the H-1B rolling, a green card would be the pathway to citizenship, and, last but not least, have children born in the US. One could facetiously say that the obsession with the American Dream was that growing up in India, the letters of the English Alphabet were: A, B, C…H-1B.

US President Donald Trump’s executive order in June limiting the entry of H-1B and L-1 visa holders outside the US must be seen in this light to understand how it accentuated the angst many Indian immigrants in the US go through — that sense of being in immigration limbo.

As politics and campaigning surrounding the November presidential elections continue, there is a myopic notion that a Democratic administration under a Joe Biden presidency, with the first Indian origin (albeit half) Vice-President by his side…