Indian Americans and the Trump Administration (Feb 2025)

Event Date: Friday, February 13 · 9am-10am PT | Noon-1pm ET

Visas, Green Card Backlogs, and Undocumented Immigration

It is not until immigration laws were liberalized in 1965 that people from India were allowed to legally emigrate to the United States. The last few decades have seen a boom in Indian immigration largely in the tech sector and other similar industries. Indeed, Indians are the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas today. There are over 5 million people who trace their roots to India in the U.S. Many of these people came on employment-based visas and now are trapped in jobs waiting decades for green cards due to unfair American laws.

Surprisingly, there is a new trend of illegal immigration from India to the U.S. Indeed, during a one-year period from October 2022 to September 2023, nearly 100,000 Indians were apprehended, expelled, or denied entry at our borders having entered the U.S. without papers. Indian immigrants now constitute the third largest undocumented community in the United States with around 1 million members.

How will Trump’s proposed mass deportation impact Indians? Will H-1B visas decrease? Will the denial of birthright citizenship survive constitutional challenges? Will Trump’s policies deny asylum to people from India? Trump has claimed he will give green cards to all highly-skilled workers. Will he follow through? What is the prosect of Congressional action?

Moderator: Sital Kalantry, Founding Director Roundglass India Center, Associate Dean and Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School.

Speakers:

• Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law
  
• Jeff Lande, President of advisory firm The Lande Group and an expert on the potential impact public policy and politics can have on global industrial sectors, particularly on issues related to high skill immigration and IT outsourcing.

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