H-1B: Indian Migrants Want Elon Musk to Help Them Win Green Cards

A lobby group for Indian H-1B contract workers is trying to use the GOP’s planned 2025 reconciliation bill to get fast-track green cards for roughly 1.2 million Indian citizens living in the United States.

The lobbying effort is built on the hope that President Donald Trump’s West Coast business allies will defeat the rising skepticism of many voters and GOP legislators, many zig-zagging Democratic legislators, and President Donald Trump’s American-first mandate.

“There’s a blank slate at the moment,” immigration attorney Leon Fresco told many of the Indian migrants during a phone conference hosted by the Immigration Voice lobby group on Sunday night.

“We don’t know this could literally be the best of times, or this could literally be the worst of times,” said Fresco, who worked as an advisor for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the “Gang of Eight” amnesty was being drafted in 2013.

“We believe that the time is now as the upcoming new administration takes over,” said Aman Kapoor, the president of Immigration Voice. “There is new energy, there is now a desire to make changes, and we want to be part of that change.”

There is a trickle of media reports about the emerging clash between West Coast investors and Trump’s pro-American populist deputies. But that coverage focuses on demands by a smaller number of Silicon Valley investors who want more imported elite software writers to accelerate their start-up companies toward buyouts on Wall Street.

Unfortunately for the Valley’s start-up investors, experienced American software experts want to be paid with equity shares from the Wall Street buyouts. Instead of that free-market bargain, many investors prefer to hoard their shares by hiring foreign experts who can be paid with government-provided green cards and citizenship.

The renewed Indian push for green cards emerges from a different source — the million-plus Indians who have been imported for routine jobs in technology, accounting, healthcare, recruitment, or management at Fortune 500 firms and their subcontractors.

Advocates in D.C. are hiding that elite vs routine distinction.

“If the US is to stay competitive, Elon must win this ideological fight [for migrants] over [Trump aide] Stephen Miller,” immigration lawyer Greg Siskind tweeted on December 13.

“In the same way that it took Nixon to go to China — because he was tough on China — President Trump may have an interesting opportunity” to get the GOP support for more white-collar migration, Vivek Chilukuri, a former Democratic staffer now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Politico on December 1.

Many Indian migrants are praying for intervention by Musk, who once had an H-1B visa as he migrated step-by-step from South Africa to the United States.

Musk, however, zig-zags between his economic goal of mass migration and his political goal of preserving Americans’ entrepreneurial and high-trust culture.

Critics, however, are confident that Congress will block the Indians’ demand for more green cards.

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The Indians’ fight for more green cards is an uphill battle and is aided by few sincere allies.

The Indians have earned little sympathy in Congress because nearly all of them were imported by investors and their executives to take career-starting, mid-skill white-collar jobs that would otherwise have gone to young U.S. professionals.

The Indians are allowed to take desirable careers from Americans because many U.S. employers use the H-1B, L-1, J-1, TN, OPT, CPT, and H4EAD programs to hire low-wage foreign graduates, mostly for entry-level jobs. Indians get roughly 70 percent of these visas.

These programs are uncapped, do not require the jobs be offered to Americans, and do not require a skills test. Only the uncapped O-1 “genius visa” requires proof of prior accomplishment.

India’s government heavily promotes Indians for these multi-year visas. In 2023, roughly 69,000 low-skilled, mid-skilled, or high-skilled Indians got approved for H-1B visas, and another 210,000 got three-year extensions on their visas, according to Indian reports.

Those numbers suggest that at least 600,000 Indian H-1B workers now hold white-collar jobs needed by American graduates. More than 500,000 other Indians hold jobs via other visa programs.

Critically, some of these white-collar migration programs also allow executives to dangle the huge deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship for their visa workers and all of their descendants.

Since 1990, that dangled bonus has pulled millions of Indian graduates into a wide variety of white-collar jobs where they work long hours at low wages to win the approval of their executives who have the remarkable power to nominate them for U.S. citizenship — or to send them home in disgrace.

This inflow is cheered on by executives who can convert every $1 in payroll savings into $20 of additional stock value.

But the rush of Indian migrants has also created a multi-year traffic jam for green cards.

The federal government offers 140,000 green cards each year to the employees of U.S. companies. The law sets a “country cap” so the cards are shared out to many diverse countries. This diversity rule helps CEOs deliver fast-track green cards to their diverse experts from China and many other countries — but it also ensures that the Indians have created a huge backlog of Indian green card applicants.

More than 1.2 million Indian workers and family members are now waiting in line for green cards.

Indians get roughly a quarter of the annual employers’ green cards — but compete furiously against each other to grab the annual prize. For example, many Indians hire experts to help them arbitrage the complex and vague rules for different categories of green cards.

The inflow is pushed by India’s governments and by ethnic networks of U.S.-based Indian managers, subcontractors, and recruiters who rent Americans’  jobs to their in-network Indians.

The networks exist because corporate boards prefer to hire Indian managers to deal with the cheap, disposable, and subordinate foreign workers, many of whom are delivered via staffing subcontractors. Because of migration, U.S. executives “see their American workforce as being expensive, undeserving and expendable,” said Lynn.

The discriminatory networks are replicated in other countries where Indians work, and are accepted by the U.S. government’s post-1990s pro-migration economic policy.

When they are walking across the southern border or flying into a U.S. airport, desperate migrants do desperate things. Many airport migrants submit duplicate applications against the rules and lie about their training, credentials, and ability to speak English. Naturally, many lose out to scammers and customs officers as they try to migrate to the US, UK, Sweden, or Canada.

The corporate exploitation of Indian visa workers, Indian recruiters, and Indian middle managers, however, degrades companies’ product quality, long-term investments, and innovation — and the nation’s prosperity. {snip}

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The investor-backed inflow of Indian visa workers since 1990 has exiled so many American college graduates that many Fortune 500 companies are dominated by Indian technology managers and CEOs.

The inflow also creates myriad security concerns as unidentifiable foreign workers from China, India, and many other countries are hired to develop, maintain, and operate the nation’s electronic infrastructure.

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