Trump voiced his support for immigration visas for high-skilled workers, speaking to the New York Post following the controversy. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favour of the visas. That’s why we have them,” he said, referring to the H-1B programme. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great programme.”
Trump, however, had moved to restrict access to H-1B visas in his first term.
Restrictions on H-1B under president Trump
In 2016, Trump said the H-1B programme was “very bad for workers” and called to end it. His administration brought in memos that increased H-1B denials and time-consuming requests for evidence. Further, it tried to make it more difficult for individuals to qualify for an H-1B petition by narrowing which jobs and educational degrees were eligible under the definition of ‘specialty occupation’. It also moved to prevent employers from sending H-1B employees to provide services at customer locations—an issue that particularly affected Indian IT services firms—by shifting legal obligations onto the customers.
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Even as these rules were blocked on procedural grounds, official data show that denial rates went up from 6% in FY 2015 to as high as 24% in FY 2018, before coming down to 4% in FY 2021 when Joe Biden took over.What explains the U-turn?
The U-turn may be an acknowledgement of the domestic engineering talent shortage in the US highlighted by Musk and other technologists who have Trump’s ear.
In June, Trump had said that he would like to allow foreigners who received degrees from US universities to be able to stay on automatically in order to contribute to the economy. If they were not given this opportunity, they would instead return to countries like India or China and build large companies and create jobs there, he had explained.
Indians see both vitriol and support
Racist comments about how Indian-origin CEOs of American Big Tech companies “smell bad” and Indians having poor hygiene and sanitation went viral online.
Musk called the critics “contemptible fools” and “unrepentant racists” who should be removed from the Republican party.
Right-wing commentator and Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology president Richard Hanania said, “Show them Indians succeeding, they’ll say Indians don’t found any companies. Show them they found companies, they’ll move on to something else. Racism makes you dumb. They should be honest and say smarter people of a different colour make them feel inferior.”
