In Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister, when he was the Hand, told Joffrey: “We’ve had vicious kings and we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t know if we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king!”
That’s perhaps how Indians on an H-1B feel in America right now, though they would never say it out loud to anyone for fear of facing the wrath of the new Nightwalkers: ICE agents. The H-1B was a golden ticket for Indians, but the vacillating rules make it seem like they are stuck in a dystopian Hunger Games where their fate is decided by a vacuous and vicious vacillator whose modus vivendi changes every day. On September 19, the White House put out a proclamation saying you needed to cough up $100,000 for an H-1B application.
This caused panic, with H-1B holders outside the US thinking they had to rush back before September 21 or pay $100,000 to re-enter. Some thought $100,000 was a recurring tax, but later the White House clarified it was a one-time payment per petition, not an annual tax, and that renewals and current H-1B holders were exempt.
Uncle Sam has also claimed they are going to move the H-1B from a lottery system to a merit-based one, but the reason this has caused panic among Indians the most is that 70% of all H-1Bs are held by Indians, with the green-card backlog at 1.8 million, including 1.1 million Indians stuck for years. So any noose around the H-1B would be, for all intents and purposes, an albatross around the neck of Indian applicants.
But here’s the thing that most Indians forget: this is Uncle Sam’s system — you are the guest here. While the Indic notion is that atithi devo bhava, there’s no reason for Uncle Sam to live by the same tenet. Anyone who applies to the US is effectively on parole. You are literally in someone else’s house — and they don’t owe you anything.
The American Dream has been bought hook, line, and sinker by immigrants of all ilk who believed in the maxim engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: give me your wretched masses. It’s just something written on a statue, a line from an 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus, and while it might have been the edifice upon which America became the greatest country on the planet, that doesn’t mean Uncle Sam’s gravy train will continue forever.
For Uncle Sam, you are not the Chosen Ones, but labour – skilled or unskilled – who must prove your worth before being given a bone. You are a coolie, valued when convenient, dispensable when not. Your entire worth is decided by capitalism, whose prophet on earth is big companies.
Every proclamation, every tweak to the H-1B system, should remind you of the brutal truth: you are there at the pleasure of someone else’s whims and fancies. The moment it stops serving them, the drawbridge goes up and you are left outside the castle. You may write code, design chips, or run billion-dollar product teams, but your visa is still stamped nonimmigrant. It says clearly: temporary. And if you read between the lines, your passport might as well say “on parole” — like an inmate allowed out only under strict conditions.