San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Work visa crackdown threatens Silicon Valley’s ties to India
HYDERABAD, India — The sun glares down on an ancient temple where Pruthvi Yadav joins a swirling mass of devotees. The deity here, he’s been told, is particularly powerful at granting U.S. visas.
On this 98-degree morning at Chilkur Balaji Temple, he’s swept into the crowd praying to Lord Balaji — walking 11 laps around the temple for a wish, 108 laps for an answered prayer. As his bare feet shuffle against the scorching ground, his mind focuses on a far-flung place: California’s Silicon Valley.
In the middle of the crowd, a priest, C.S. Rangarajan, squawks into a microphone: “Donald Trump is temporary! Lord Balaji is forev-
er!”
It’s a quip Rangarajan often makes at the temple, where he says more and more people are coming to him with discouraging news since the Trump administration, reluctant to admit immigrants, took power. Some speak of visa applications with CANCELED stamped on them in red block letters. Of rushed departures. Jobs, families and opportunities left behind.
“Just keep trying,” Rangarajan tells them. “Trust Lord Balaji.”
This is the fourth time that Yadav, who has two academic degrees and works as a manager at a consulting company, has tried to get to the U.S. He has a job waiting for him in the Bay Area if he can secure an H-1B visa. But he keeps getting rejected. And if it doesn’t work out this time — even with the help of Lord Balaji — he’s going to stop trying.
The effects of President Trump’s crackdown on foreign newcomers are particularly felt in Hyderabad, a city dense with visa recipients and hopefuls, where an American education and resume have long been held as status symbols and a ticket to a better life. Telangana, the surrounding Indian state, saw its economy grow 14 percent last year. But even considering India’s lower cost of living, the salary differences are stark: The average Google software engineer, for example, makes a base pay of $21,500 in Hyderabad, but about $121,400 in San Francisco, according to Glassdoor, the job-reviews site.
But as reports of tougher visa odds reverberate throughout this city, Yadav’s desire to work in Silicon Valley is starting to fade. Just a few miles away from the temple is the city nicknamed Cyberabad, with outposts of about 130 American tech companies and a growing number of homegrown startups. If Yadav doesn’t make it to Fremont — his chosen destination in California — there is plenty he can do at home.
Still, he said, he’s built up the American dream in his head. It would be nice to fulfill it. So he continues walking, every two minutes marking a completed lap on a small pink piece of paper.
One ... two ... three ...
Yadav’s story epitomizes a fear of many in America’s tech hub: that talent not welcome in the U.S. will go elsewhere, or stay home. A flurry of new rules issued by the administration is making those worries more concrete.
“People used to not be able to use their skills back in China, Taiwan and India. But now you can,” said Anna Lee Saxenian, the dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, who has studied foreigners in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. “And when you have places like Hyderabad, where you have healthy tech development, there are real alternatives.”
For years, India was Silicon Valley’s back office — a place where menial tasks such as updating business software, fixing bugs and entering data got done while California slept. Then as the U.S. loosened its borders in the 1990s and the demand for tech talent grew, foreigners started streaming into the Bay Area, quickly accounting for a quarter of the region’s scientific and engineering workforce by the turn of the century, according to Saxenian.
Since 2006, Indians have been responsible for creating the most venture-backed publicly traded companies with immigrant founders, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Others worked their way up and are now at the helm of major tech companies, like Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Shantanu Narayen at Adobe. Nadella was born in Hyderabad; Narayen grew up there.
While foreigners are still coming to the U.S. in droves, applications for H-1B visas, which allow foreigners to live and work in the U.S., have fallen by 19 percent over the past two years. Government requests for information — a bureaucratic step that slows applications — as well as outright denials have increased, and applications for lowerwage positions now face more scrutiny.
Katherine Hadda, U.S. consul general in Hyderabad, said America is open to foreign talent, but the administration is right to take another look at the H-1B program.
“We still take more immigrants than anywhere in the world,” she said in an interview inside the regal consulate. Outside in the hot sun, hordes of people waited in line for their U.S. visa interviews — some for hours. “We have to remember that the H-1B program was designed (about) 25 years ago ... and when you have a policy in place from 25 years ago, I think it is very reasonable to look at it and make sure it is still meeting its intentions.”
Critics of the visa program say the crackdown is a positive step to reforming the country’s broken immigration system, where the bar for the skills needed to obtain a visa has been lowered over the years.
“The numbers are still so big, but now it’s about the quality — are you really getting the cream of the crop?” said Ron Hira, an associate with the Economic Policy Institute, which has pushed for reform of the H-1B program. “The notion that we have to fill ordinary jobs with people from India, rather than training people from here, I think, is a bit of a false choice.”
The U.S. labor force is more responsive than many people believe, Hira says, pointing to National Science Board data that show the number of undergraduates who earned science and engineering degrees increased by more than 250,000 from 2000 to 2015. The overwhelming majority of those students were U.S. citizens.
But at Silicon Valley firms, established companies and startups alike, there is a constant complaint: They simply can’t find the U.S. talent to fill their open jobs.
Saxenian calls the sharing of talent between countries “brain circulation.” It’s been mutually beneficial, she says, giving U.S. companies access to highly skilled talent, while those foreigners can return home and help spur their own economy.
But what happens if that steady flow of talent slows to a drip?
More than 65 percent of India’s population is younger than 35, putting the country on track to have the world’s largest workforce by 2027, according to Bloomberg. Yadav’s career path is common for his age, 29, and education: a bachelor’s degree in computer science, an MBA, and now a stable job at a consulting company that connects other firms with tech talent.
But just a few years ago, he said, the next logical step in his career would have been going to the U.S.
“I was excited when it was the first time,” Yadav said recently as he waited to hear if he’d been chosen in the H-1B lottery. “I was interested and excited to come and learn more about tech and maybe even start something.”
He was disappointed when he wasn’t chosen the first time. Same for the second time. Now he’s grown indifferent.
Hyderabad is a city where billboards advertising U.S. visa consultations have long dotted the highways. But keep driving, and you’ll find 151 acres devoted to the Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy — HITEC — City. That’s where you’ll find offices of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as well as Western coffee shops and breweries bustling with young professionals.
It wasn’t like this when Nikhil Das left for school in the U.S. nine years ago, but he was still devastated to be back home.
He was eating dinner with his girlfriend in Indiana in December when he got an email saying his H-1B extension had been denied. After he’d worked six years for the same client, the government decided that his job wasn’t “specialized” enough to warrant a high-skilled visa. The same extension application, he said, had been accepted just three years before.
Such denials are becoming common, as immigration officials follow orders to tighten up the process.
Now Das is back in southern India, hoping to get back to the life he’d created for himself in Indiana. While there, he took up salsa dancing and jiujitsu. He ran half marathons. He fell in love.
It’s clear how out of place Das feels as he moves through Hyderabad. His accent is diluted, and he’s lost his bargaining skills — an essential in India, where foreigners are often charged a premium at markets. The blue REI backpack he carries everywhere holds an extra charger and water, just in case. Just days after returning home, he got food poisoning, his stomach disrupted by the unfamiliarity with his parents’ home cooking.
At first, he was desperate to get back to the U.S. But as he waits to figure out his status, he said, he’s slowly getting over the shock of return. He’s noticed flickers of change in Hyderabad that are slowly convincing him that staying home wouldn’t be so bad.
“Those buildings weren’t there when I left,” he said as he stood on top of a historic military fort, overlooking a view reminiscent of that from San Francisco’s Twin Peaks — miles of flat structures suddenly shot through with towering buildings and cranes piercing the sky.
In those buildings are companies lured to Hyderabad by government tax incentives. U.S. firms also expanding in the city. Adobe’s Narayen returned in February to announce the opening of an artificial intelligence lab; the company has about a third of its global workforce in India. It’s one of many increasing their presence.
Places like Hyderabad have prospered because they could be part of what Saxenian, the Berkeley dean, calls “global value chains,” with U.S. companies at the helm. She doesn’t think this kind of development would have happened if people weren’t able to stay in the U.S. and travel back and forth.
“If we get cut off,” she added, “the biggest fear is that if you move into an era where the flow of people, of capital, of technology are much more constrained by policy, it will slow those things down.”
Meanwhile, an incubator backed by the Indian government, T-Hub, is courting young entrepreneurs returning from the U.S. — as well as those who never left in the first place.
Visa crackdowns “have been fantastic for us,” said Jay Krishnan, CEO of T-Hub. “While we as a country are trying to potentially take off as a startup nation ... the only way to fill that gap is to bring in folks that have a cultural affinity for India.”
If he weren’t in love with someone in the U.S., Das said, he wouldn’t even bother trying to return.
Back at the temple, Yadav is completing his final laps.
Besides his H-1B visa, he had many other things to wish for on this morning, like blessings on his upcoming wedding. So he did the full 108 laps instead of the standard 11.
The Chilkur Balaji Temple isn’t just for visas; people also seek Lord Balaji’s help with tests, marriages and pregnancies. But Rangarajan, the priest, says the number of people coming to the temple to pray for visas has only increased over the years: “The more the scrutiny, the more the prayer,” he said.
Six miles and 1 hour and 59 minutes of walking later, Yadav finishes: 107 ... 108.
Yadav knows he has less than a 50 percent chance at getting to the U.S., based on the visa lottery odds, but these 108 laps around the temple — 11,600 steps, to be exact — are a small price to pay to boost his chances of spending a few years in the Bay Area. The U.S. has unmistakable advantages, he says.
“Everyone has that dream; it’s still the top country in the world,” he said.
But it’s all up to fate, he says. If he doesn’t get his H-1B this time, that’s it for his American dream.
“I would love to come to the U.S. I love to travel. But not that desperately.”