The H-1 B Visa and the Fading American Dream

The H-1B visa once symbolised the American Dream for Indians, but today's students are increasingly asking whether they need America at all.

In 1995, the question was: How do I get to America? In 2026, it may be: Do I need to?

Watching the news on my phone as I head home after dropping my daughter at Calcutta airport for her flight to Boston for university, I get a strong sense of déjà vu.  Once again, the H-1B visa programme is making headlines.

New proposals would make it harder for international students to transition from study to work, more expensive for professionals to enter America on temporary work visas, and harder still to move from the H-1B to permanent residency -- the coveted Green Card.

I have seen this controversy rage, subside, and rage again.

Yet as I watch this familiar debate unfold, I cannot help but wonder whether, this time, something is fundamentally different.

Three decades after my husband and I entered the United States through the immigration pathways built around the H-1B visa, politicians, business leaders and commentators are still arguing about its purpose.

The H-1B programme shaped my life and those of countless others from my generation. But the world that produced it has changed.

A Personal Journey Through the H-1B System

In July 1995, I stood at the American consulate in Calcutta applying for an H-4 visa as the spouse of an H-1B worker.

A few weeks earlier, I had married my husband, who had flown in from Boston, where he worked for an engineering firm after completing a master's degree in structural engineering at a public university in the United States.

"He is one of those, is he?" the woman behind the fortified glass counter asked. "He doesn't want to come back." At the time, neither of us knew the answer.

A few minutes later, I was out in the midday sun, happily waving my stamped passport at my smiling husband.

During his final year in graduate school, my husband explained that he needed to find employment during his Optional Practical Training (OPT) period and secure an employer willing to sponsor an H-1B visa.

Only then could he come to India for our wedding. When I asked how I could continue working in America, the answer was simple: I couldn't. As an H-4 spouse, I would have to wait until I obtained my own work authorization or a Green Card.

He left for Boston a week after my visa came through, and a month later, amid both tears and anticipation, I flew out to join him.

It was evening as we drove into Lord Baron Apartments, our little suburban apartment complex.

As I got out of the car, the first smell that caught my nose was of spicy curry leaves.

I looked around and noticed many young Indian men and families milling about the lawns and common areas. "Have we even left India?" I asked. "All H-1Bs," my husband replied.

"Software workers, mostly from Bangalore and Hyderabad." Then, with a grin, he added: "Actually, they're renaming this place Lord Brahma Apartments."

I busied myself setting up our small household, making frequent trips to the town library and getting to know many of the women in the neighbourhood who were on H-4 visas like me.

The H-1B's Role in the Indian Immigrant Experience

The H-1B transformed the Indian immigrant experience from the 1990s through the 2010s.

What had once been a pathway largely reserved for highly accomplished graduate students and a small number of affluent families became accessible to a much broader middle class.

For many, the visa became more than a work permit. It was the gateway to the American Dream.

Families pooled savings to finance an American education, confident that careers in technology and engineering would eventually repay the investment. For many, they did.

More importantly, the H-1B often led to a Green Card, opening the door to job mobility, stability and eventually citizenship.

For many immigrants, that transition marked a turning point: better jobs, a first home, growing financial security and, for some, leadership positions in the technology industry. Indian graduates from American universities moved through the same pathway, from OPT to H-1B and, often, permanent residency.

Transitioning from the H-1B to an employer-sponsored Green Card was relatively quick in the 1990s, taking on average about a year and a half.

However, the federal shutdown of 1997 slowed that process dramatically. While we still had time left on the H-1B visa, my husband and I found ourselves caught in a growing backlog.

By the time the Green Card finally arrived, we had experienced the less visible side of the programme, just as newspapers and television commentators were portraying H-1B workers as either indispensable talent or unfair competition.

We discovered the programme's limitations firsthand. At the time, the H-1B was effectively non-transferable; changing employers required a new petition, an expensive and uncertain process that could jeopardise an H-1B visa holder's legal status.

As a result, many workers were tied to sponsoring firms, giving employers considerable leverage over wages and working conditions.

While many senior tech workers largely escaped these pressures, those lower down the software value chain often did not.

Later reforms addressed some of these shortcomings, but judging from today's debates, the tensions never entirely disappeared.

Evolving Global Opportunities and the Future of Migration

In the meantime, I began an MA in economic development at a state university. The H-1B debate was gathering momentum.

Businesses argued that the programme was essential to American competitiveness, while critics claimed it displaced domestic workers.

In a strange twist, I found myself studying the H-1B workforce with a senior colleague.

We wanted to understand its impact on both the American and Indian technology sectors.

Our findings were more complicated than either side of the debate suggested.

H-1B workers were not always underpaid, nor were they primarily filling highly specialised roles unavailable to domestic workers.

Many were doing routine software work. Yet they were central to a new model of global production in which businesses increasingly combined work performed in the US with work performed offshore, either through their own offshore units or by outsourcing to software service providers, thereby lowering costs while expanding capacity.

After receiving our Green Cards, my husband moved on to better opportunities, and I joined a Boston think-tank.

We bought a home, welcomed our daughter and became citizens.

We settled into American life, with annual trips home to be with family and visits from them.

We fell into suburban life -- waiting for spring, mowing the lawn in summer, raking leaves in the fall and shovelling snow in winter.

We tried to keep a balance between our nostalgia for our homeland and the new one we had adopted.

We celebrated the Fourth of July with a barbecue, Durga Puja with Indian friends and neighbours, Thanksgiving with an Indian twist, and kept the Diwali lights on till Christmas.

Yet by the early 2010s, family considerations and business opportunities had brought us back to India as reverse migrants.

In the 1990s, America was where the work was. The most ambitious students came because the universities were among the world's best.

Engineers came because the projects were there. Software workers came because the clients were there.

The H-1B visa was not merely a work permit. It was a bridge into the centre of the global economy.

The constant movement of engineers and managers between India and America helped build an information highway and one of India's most important export sectors: software services.

H-1B workers carried knowledge, expertise and business relationships across borders. But over time, the relationship changed.

What began as staffing and low-end coding evolved into engineering, product development and platform management.

Today, multinational firms operate Global Capability Centres in India that are far more than back offices.

They build products, manage platforms, deploy AI systems, conduct cybersecurity operations and oversee global business functions.

India has also developed a vibrant start-up ecosystem, many of whose founders are former migrants who returned from the United States and elsewhere.

The Shifting Value Proposition of the American Dream

As I watch my daughter begin her own journey as a young American, I find myself wondering whether the future belongs not to one destination, but to a world in which opportunity has become more mobile, less rooted in specific locations.

The biggest change since I rode on the H-1B highway is not simply that America has become harder to enter and that the immigrant experience has become more fraught.

The question confronting today's students and professionals is fundamentally different from the one my generation faced.

In 1995, the question was: How do I get to America? How do I get on the H-1B visa? In 2026, it may increasingly be: Do I need to? Do I want to? Is it worth it?

This does not mean America has lost its advantages. Far from it.

The United States remains the centre of frontier artificial intelligence research, venture capital, entrepreneurship and much of global scientific innovation.

For most of my generation, world-class opportunities required migration. Increasingly, they do not.

The irony is that the H-1B programme may be under its greatest political pressure just as the need for it is changing.

The debate assumes that workers must still travel to where the work is. Yet increasingly, the work itself is travelling.

The software highway that once carried people to America now increasingly carries projects, platforms and ideas in other directions, at the same time as new technological capabilities take root in different locations around the world.

Artificial intelligence complicates the picture further. Restricting H-1B visas may encourage some American companies to hire more Americans.

It may encourage others to move more work overseas. Or AI may reduce the need for workers everywhere while increasing demand for a smaller group of highly skilled engineers, researchers and managers.

Perhaps the future debate should not be framed as American workers versus Indian workers.

It may increasingly become American workers and AI, and Indian workers and AI.

Even for those who still seek international experience, changing immigration policies in America and other Western countries have introduced new uncertainty.

Without a credible pathway to long-term residency, the financial investment may simply be too great for many students and professionals.

In all this, I cannot help thinking that restricting immigration for students and professionals, and weakening pathways from the H-1B to permanent residency, does more than close legal routes for aspiring migrants.

It diminishes America as a place of possibility -- the very thing that has given it much of its influence and appeal in the world.

The loss may not be only for migrants. For generations, America's greatest strength was not simply that people could come -- it was that they wanted to.

The big change will not be merely that fewer people reach America, but that fewer people imagine their future there.

Perhaps that is the most sobering thought of all as the nation celebrates its 250th year.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff