Trump immigration plans stir fear in Indian diaspora
Those who built lives in US face uncertain future
NEW DELHI — When President Donald Trump announced via a late-night tweet he would “suspend immigration” to protect U.S. jobs from an economic tailspin caused by the coronavirus, Priyanka Nagar prepared for the worst.
For more than a decade, Nagar, an Indian citizen, had steadily built a life in the United States but she was now back in India, awaiting a visa extension. She and her husband, who works for Microsoft, have applied for green cards. They hung an American flag from their balcony in their home in Washington state, where Nagar had given birth to the couple’s 5-year-old daughter.
But when Nagar read Trump’s tweet, while separated from her family in the U.S., the thought of leaving her hard-forged life behind without even a goodbye was devastating, she said.
“I beg the government not to think of us as enemies,” Nagar, 39, a software developer, said. “I want the U.S. to prosper. It has given us so much.”
By Tuesday, Trump had ordered a 60-day halt in issuing green cards to prevent people from immigrating to the United States, backing away from his harder-edged plans to suspend guest-worker programs after business groups erupted in anger at the prospect of losing labor from countries like India.
But as millions of Americans file for unemployment, flooding food banks and hospitals, foreign workers worry the pandemic will soon uproot them.
Immigrant groups warn that, driven by what they call the Trump administration’s protectionist impulses, the United States could purge some of its most talented workers, cutting into the vibrant multiculturalism that has made the U.S. such an attractive destination for decades.
“I cannot tell you the panic this has caused in the legal immigration community,” Nandini Nair, an immigration lawyer based in New Jersey, said of Trump’s “upending of life by a tweet.”
Further immigration restrictions could have particularly acute consequences for India, which sends thousands of highly skilled workers to the United States every year and counts a 4 million strong diaspora in the country, representing one of the largest contingents of immigrants to the United States.
Visa programs like H-1B help fill specialty positions at companies like Google, Apple and Facebook. Indian-Americans are some of the country’s most successful and wealthiest immigrants, with a particular stronghold in Silicon Valley’s startup scene.
These days, Harkamal Singh Khural, 34, a software developer living in an Atlanta suburb, said he was barely sleeping. Even if the government did not push him out, he said a volatile job market meant his immigration status was already tenuous.
The company that sponsors his H-1B visa has already let go of half of his team. His two daughters are U.S. citizens, meaning it was possible his family could get separated.
“I am afraid of losing everything,” Khural said. “This is not really about a job.”
For Indian citizens, building a more permanent base in the country was never easy.
Most of the 800,000 immigrants currently waiting for a green card are Indian citizens. Because of quotas that limit the number of workers from each country, Indians can expect to wait up to 50 years for a green card since their representation among immigrants is so high in the United States.
Analysts said immigration restrictions could strain the delicate but increasingly amicable relationship between India and the United States, the world’s most populous democracies.
In recent months, Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India have sought to build an even stronger alliance, trading compliments about each other onstage at glittering events in Houston and Ahmadabad, India.
Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said, “Any action that appears to infringe on the mobility of Indians or Indian-Americans will be strongly resisted.”
“Suffice it to say, this will not go over well in India,” he said of stricter immigration controls. “Prime Minister Modi has made outreach to the diaspora community in America and elsewhere a cornerstone of his foreign policy.”
Over a video call, Nagar’s daughter, a kindergarten student, told her: “Mommy, when the virus dies, you’ll come. I’ll wait for the virus to die.” When video conversations with her daughter end, Nagar said she sometimes lies in bed and cries.
“In the U.S., you have the whole world working together toward a common goal,” she said. “You cannot find that diversity anywhere else. I love this country.”