So, Donald Trump did the unthinkable. He hiked the H1-B visa fee to a jaw-dropping $100,000 a year. Indians screamed, IT firms panicked, and WhatsApp groups of US-obsessed engineers went into collective mourning. “What about our dream?” they cried. Ah, the great American Dream—otherwise known as the great Indian Obsession. To them I say: stop sobbing into your Starbucks cup. Trump has, in fact, done you and India a giant favour.
Let’s face it, every second Indian techie today imagines himself as the next Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella. Reality check: most end up debugging someone else’s half-written code in a cubicle outside San Jose. Some even graduate to glorious careers pumping gas in New Jersey or manning security in California. Honest work, sure—but let’s drop the pretence that the H1-B is a golden ticket exclusively for “top talent.” It’s also a glorified visa lottery for thousands of middle-rung engineers who, in India, would barely land ₹25,000 a month. Yet, in America, they suddenly become “consultants,” earn in dollars, and strut around Hyderabad on vacation as if they were born in Silicon Valley itself.
And how did so many land up there? Not divine providence. Entire desi consultancy cartels in Bengaluru and Hyderabad perfected the art of body-shopping—filing hundreds of H1-B applications, fudging résumés, gaming the lottery system, and shipping average programmers abroad by the container-load. Trump saw it for what it was: a racket bleeding America’s job market.
Now, of course, the bleeding-heart brigade says: “But these visas gave Indians better opportunities!” Better for whom? Not for India. We’ve suffered a brain drain so massive that our finest students, trained at IITs on heavily subsidized taxpayer money, happily repaid Mother India by catching the first flight to JFK. According to Pew Research, nearly 70% of all H1-B visas annually go to Indians, and over 3.2 million Indians live in the US. America built its innovation ecosystem by poaching our best talent, while we kept consoling ourselves with NRI weddings and fat remittances.
Trump, unwittingly, may have handed India a golden chance. Deny them the H1-B, and suddenly those bright minds—and even the not-so-bright ones—will have no choice but to stay back, innovate here, and maybe even build India into the “Atmanirbhar Bharat” or “Viksit Bharat” politicians keep promising. Yes, you may not drive a Tesla in San Francisco, but you can still own a Maruti in Bengaluru or Hyderabad or Visakhapatnam or Noida or Lucknow or any other Indian city, and, more importantly, contribute to your own country’s growth rather than padding someone else’s GDP.
And let’s not pretend America was ever the land of natives waiting to welcome us. The so-called “original Americans”—Native Indians—were all but exterminated by immigrants. The country itself is a patchwork of Irish, Italians, Germans, Africans, Asians. Indians piling in on H1-Bs are just one more wave of settlers milking a system. Trump has simply said: enough.
Honestly, why should America owe Indians a dream? Why should it subsidize our escape from our own responsibilities? The hard truth is, many of our H1-B “heroes” never intended to return. They became green card junkies, US citizens, and now proudly draw pensions from Uncle Sam while lecturing Indians back home about “patriotism” on Facebook. If they love America so much, let them stay. For the rest—Trump has just pushed you into doing what you should have done all along: build your own country.
Yes, you may earn less. Yes, your lifestyle may shrink. But do you really measure success only in square footage of a New Jersey mansion? Isn’t it better to create wealth, jobs, and innovations in India? Isn’t it nobler to help your nation rise militarily and economically, rather than bask in borrowed glory abroad?
So, thank you, Mr. Trump. By killing the H1-B dream, you may have done what our own leaders couldn’t: forced Indians to stop fantasizing about Silicon Valley and start investing their sweat and brains into Bharat. If some of our so-called “global citizens” really have any love left for their motherland, now is the time to prove it.
Cry if you must, but cry here in India—while building it into a nation others dream of migrating to. That, dear friends, is the real American Dream. Except this time, it will be the Indian one.
