Credit: RDNE Stock project, Pexels

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The start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will probably be remembered for the flurry of executive orders that he signed at blinding speed. Arguably the most concerning and critical of these orders have been the ones against immigrants. Trump wasted no time to deliver on his pre-election promise of deporting “undocumented” immigrants. Acting on his order, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) promptly started mass arrests and deportations. ICE agents raided schools and workplaces and even visited suspected individuals’ homes to meet their daily quota of arrests.[1] In the meantime, on January 29, 2025, the Republican-led Laken Riley Act was swiftly passed into law—with support from twelve Democratic Senators. The law gives extraordinary power to state governments to overturn federal protection measures for immigrants. More anti-immigrant bills and orders are expected throughout his term.

Despite some equivocations at the rank-and-file grassroots,[2] U.S. labor unions are generally supportive of immigrant workers. For at least the past quarter century, U.S. unions have viewed immigrants as essential members of the labor market and sources of diversity[3] whose inclusion can increase union membership.[4] Quite expectedly, then, several U.S. labor unions have condemned Trump’s crackdown on immigrant workers’ rights. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president Liz Shuler reminded U.S. workers in her statement on January 21, 2025, “An immigrant doesn’t stand between you and a good job—a billionaire does.” She added, “Deporting people whose labor helps our country prosper and cutting off pathways into the United States is not only a betrayal of our values—it is also a recipe for economic disaster.”[5] In fact, anticipating Trump’s anti-labor and anti-immigrant agenda, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—almost one-fourth of whose members are immigrants—reunited with the AFL-CIO in January 2025 after twenty years of separation.

The streams of concern and commiseration, however, evaporate when U.S. labor encounters immigrant workers on H-1B visas. Most H-1B visa holders are Indian nationals. The majority among them are relatively high-income tech workers (median annual income is approximately $120,000 a year). No significant coalition exists between these workers and U.S. labor unions. In 2020, in fact, the AFL-CIO Department of Professional Employees (DPE) blamed the H-1B program for cutting into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs for Black, Latino, and women workers,6 without mentioning that almost 69 percent of U.S. tech workers are white, and an overwhelming majority are men.[7] In Trump’s second term, the same critique of the H-1B program seems to have resurfaced among U.S. labor groups. At this critical moment, it is important to understand how and why no significant relationship has developed between Indian immigrant tech workers and even pro-immigrant U.S. labor unions. While resentment and recrimination currently characterize the discourse circulating on both sides, there is also enormous potential for solidarity. To that end, I offer a series of recommendations for each party.

No significant coalition exists between these [H-1B Visa] workers and U.S. labor unions.

My findings and insights are based on research conducted from 2020 to 2025. I draw on thirty-one in-depth interviews with Indian immigrant tech workers in the United States, over 80 hours of participant observation of Indian immigrant tech workers’ activism (particularly three groups: Bengali Women’s Forum, Immigration Voice, and Origin Discriminated Immigrants Group),8 over 700 hours of virtual ethnography on social media and messaging platforms, and ethnography in four U.S. cities (Hartford, New York, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) where Indian tech workers live, work, and organize. I have also reviewed media reports and union literature about the H-1B visa and foreign workers published between 2020 and 2025.

Overview of the H-1B Visa System
The H-1B visa program started under the Immigration Act of 1990, reportedly with advocacy from emerging tech companies. The U.S. government supplied “skilled”[9] immigrant workers primarily to the fast-expanding tech industry, and additionally to industries like healthcare, law, scientific research, and higher education.10 Overall, the H-1B program gave a more concrete shape to the skill-based immigration program that had started under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act or the Hart-Celler Act. Both the Hart-Celler Act and the 1990 Act ended prior restrictions on immigration from Asian countries. A number of Indian and Chinese immigrants could enter the United States under the skill-based visa programs over the next few decades.

Since 1990, the year when the visa program started, Indian immigrants have received the largest share of H-1B visas. In 2023, more than 70 percent of H-1B visa recipients were Indian nationals, followed by the Chinese.[11] Over half of them joined tech companies, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the U.S. tech labor force.[12] Every year 65,000 H-1B visas are issued to applicants based on a lottery (some countries are exempt from the cap and lottery). The remaining 20,000 are issued to applicants seeking employment in nonprofit organizations like colleges and universities. The H-1B is a “nonimmigrant” or temporary visa, but it is “dual intent”—meaning the visa-holding workers can apply for permanent U.S. residency and then naturalize into U.S. citizenship.

In 2023, over 70 percent of H-1B visa recipients were Indian nationals, followed by the Chinese.

Despite the seeming privileges it affords to immigrant workers, the visa has not fully outgrown the racist structures of U.S. immigration laws. Its fundamental aim is to import “cheap labor” from the Global South.[13] It makes employment “indentured”—tying workers to specific employers for years.[14] That leads to restrictions on income and promotions. Over 60 percent of H-1B visa  holders earn less than U.S.-born workers, which also leads to wage depression in the U.S. labor market.[15] The visa holders’ continuous dependence on employers for travel and employment authorization limits opportunities for activism. Also, while the visa allows immigrant workers to bring their family members on “dependent” visas, dependents can only be spouses and children—meaning, the system enforces a heteronormative nuclear-family structure on immigrants.[16] In addition, “dependent” visa holders face restrictions on gainful employment until the primary visa holder is approved for permanent residency. For most, it takes years to reach that approval status, leading to prolonged exclusion of their spouses (and children) from income opportunities.[17]

For most Indian immigrants, due to their country of birth, the permanent residency or Green Card approval period is extremely long. Every year the U.S. government issues 140,000 employment-based Green Cards, equally distributed among applicants from each country (7 percent of 140,000 or 9,800 Green Cards). But Indian immigrants receive a far higher number of H-1B visas every year, and several of the visa holders—including their family members18—eventually apply for Green Cards. The stark disparity between high demand and limited supply has resulted in a “Green Card backlog” for over a million Indian immigrants in the United States. As long as they remain in the backlog, they will continue facing most if not all of the restrictions related to the H-1B visa. Some studies claim that at the current rate of processing delay, a recent employment-based Green Card applicant from India in some categories (EB-2 and EB-3) would be approved for permanent residency after 150 years—meaning, never in their lifetime.[19]

U.S. Labor Unions’ Resentment
Many U.S. labor unions have historically harbored resentment against immigrants, but occasionally expressed solidarity and organized immigrant workers.[20] In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, barring exceptions like the International Workers of the World and Knights of Labor, most U.S. unions blamed immigrants for wage depression and reducing jobs for U.S.-born white workers. Since 2000, however, despite some persistent resentment at the grassroots, most labor unions in the United States have been supporting immigrant workers.[21]

U.S. labor unions have vacillated between resentment and indifference regarding Indian immigrant tech workers on H-1B visas. The Communication Workers of America (CWA) reached out to tech workers in India (i.e., those doing outsourced work) in the early 2000s for a short-lived transnational coalition.[22] But in their interviews for my research, immigrant Indian tech labor activists in the United States recalled no such explicit gestures from U.S. labor unions toward them. Immigration Voice, the largest group representing Indian immigrant tech workers in the  United States, active since 2005, identifies labor unions as “anti-immigrant.” Other similar organizations, too, have the same perception.

U.S. labor unions have vacillated between resentment and indifference regarding Indian immigrant tech workers on H-1B visas.

The reasons behind such grievances are simple. For decades, various right-wing groups in the United States—including those with pro-labor interests (e.g., U.S. Tech Workers) have denigrated H-1B visa holders, particularly Indian immigrants.[23] Some of their racist discourses have also culminated in hate crimes against Indian immigrants with fatal consequences.[24] Similar racist discourses have intensified since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, particularly on social media.

Trump’s tolerance for and his acolyte Elon Musk’s nonchalance about such racist attacks and ambivalent support for the H-1B program[25] have further complicated the scenario. On February 6, 2025, a member of Musk’s the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), 25-year-old Marko Elez, quit the team after his racist social media activities came to light. Elez had called on his followers to “normalize Indian hate.” But Musk rehired him within two days. In December 2024, Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan as the Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, too, elicited similar racist responses from far-right supporters and labor groups.

Progressives, the political left, and most U.S. labor unions and federations have not overtly chimed into the anti-Indian racist cacophony. But it is also true that the AFLCIO has not issued any statement about racism against Indian tech workers. In the past, too, there were no statements about their precarious conditions, hate crimes against them, the Green-Card backlog, their family separation, and its generational effects on their children.26 Instead, the AFL-CIO has expressed concern about the program causing wage depression for American workers by importing cheap labor, and reducing jobs for Black and Hispanic workers.[27]

In January 2025, the progressive and pro-labor lawmaker Senator Bernie Sanders issued a memorandum on behalf of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.[28] In that document, he accused tech billionaires of reaping profit by hiring cheap labor with this “indentured” visa. Senator Sanders has sought significant reform in the program, because it  constrains U.S. workers’ and foreign workers’ rights.

Senator Sanders has failed Indian immigrant workers on one crucial point—the definition of cheap labor.

Senator Sanders’s statement has partially echoed what Indian immigrant tech workers and many labor scholars had been stating for decades—that the H-1B visa allows employers to underpay them, depress wages in the U.S. labor market, and harm all workers. But, Senator Sanders has failed Indian immigrant workers on one crucial point—the definition of cheap labor.

The academic literature on labor that highlights the effects of race, gender, caste, and migration defines the term cheap labor by focusing on the capitalist mechanisms of labor devaluation, instead of the actual skills that workers hold.[29] Scholars have shown that despite having valuable skills, socially marginalized labor groups (such as racial and ethnic minorities, women workers, and immigrants) are devalued, dehumanized, and turned into cheap labor. Restrictions on citizenship rights and constraints on activism lead to such labor devaluation or cheapening.[30] Owing to their prolonged exclusion from U.S. citizenship, Indian immigrant tech workers are indeed reduced to a cheap labor position. They experience restrictions on mobility, income, promotions, and even family formation.[31]

In the memorandum, however, Senator Sanders defined cheap labor differently—suggesting that H-1B immigrant workers are not truly skilled. Senator Sanders went as far as to allege that the H-1B visa has been used even for recruiting dog trainers and massage therapists. It is safe to assume that as an elected public representative, Senator Sanders did not indulge in misinformation. Even Indian immigrant tech labor groups have been calling out tech employers for their abuse of the system. But Senator Sanders could have painted a more accurate picture. The H-1B visa requires at least one college degree. Many workers on H-1B have degrees from U.S. universities (in case anyone is mistrustful of the Indian or any foreign education system). H-1B workers employed in scientific research and higher education have master’s degrees and in most cases PhDs. Senator Sanders had a choice to ask: Despite their skills and qualifications, how did these workers end up in exploitative cheap labor positions? Instead, with a broad brushstroke, he labeled H-1B workers as inefficient, unqualified, undeserving of employment in the United States, and potentially complicit in their employers’ fraudulent activities.[32]

The H-1B visa requires at least one college degree. Many workers on H-1B have degrees from U.S. universities (in case anyone is mistrustful of the Indian or any foreign education system). H-1B workers employed in scientific research and higher education have master’s degrees and in most cases PhDs.

Far-right groups have upheld this demeaning definition of cheap labor for decades, if not centuries. They have claimed that workers of certain racial groups, nationalities, ethnicities (genders, sexual identities, religions, castes, disabilities, and so on) are inefficient, and less deserving of American jobs compared to American workers. Senator Sanders’s claim about the cheap labor on H-1B visas, therefore, has resonated with Trump supporters, who had opposed the H-1B program and Indian immigrants for decades. Emboldened and exhilarated, they have intensified their racist attacks on Indian immigrant workers on social media. Senator Sanders’s call to reform the H-1B program—in ways that would disadvantage immigrant workers—has been reshared on social media by several right-wing anti-immigrant groups. Put differently, Senator Sanders has played right into the far right’s potent hands.

H-1B Indian Tech Workers’ Resentment
Indian immigrant tech workers in the United States tend to avoid labor unions mainly for two reasons. First, H-1B workers maintain their lawful status by periodically reporting to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Department of Labor, through their employers. The reporting process includes submission of evidence for their skills and qualifications, travel, income, tax payment, and health records. The process evokes palpable fear among them about government surveillance. The workers also apprehend that their participation in protests or mobilization of any kind would prompt their employers to retaliate by refusing to sponsor their visa. Hence, unions remain out of the question.

The second reason is their prevalent resentment against U.S. labor unions, which often accuse the H-1B workers of stealing high-income American jobs. The interviewees in my study wanted nothing to do with labor unions because they feared that the unions would betray them. Some suggested that the unions were brainwashed by the U.S. media and would never understand Indian tech workers’ challenges. There is clearly a chasm of misunderstanding widened by resentment that divides U.S. labor unions and Indian tech workers on H-1B visas.

Instead of labor unions, Indian tech workers form immigrant organizations like Immigration Voice. These groups typically pursue political advocacy—meeting and speaking with U.S. lawmakers. Members and organizers frame their participation in activism as advocacy, social work, and exercise of democratic rights.

Politically, I did not observe any rigid loyalty of these groups to either Democrats or Republicans. Organizers are open to supporting anyone who supports their pursuit of immigration reform to end the Green Card backlog. Within the organizations, however, there is a tendency to support Republican lawmakers who are generally perceived as more transparent than Democrats—even in their anti-labor and anti-immigrant policies. Many H-1B members of the immigrant organizations are critical of some specific Democratic senators, whom they allege had sabotaged a nearly passed immigration reform bill—the Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment (EAGLE)—in 2022.[33]

[W]orkers [on H-1B Visas] apprehend that their participation in protests or mobilization of any kind would prompt their employers to retaliate by refusing to sponsor their visa. Hence, unions remain out of the question.

More recently, during the Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump election campaign, members were divided in their support for the candidates. After Trump’s victory, members of the  Indian H-1B tech community started expecting positive changes with cautious optimism. But they also remain anxious about Trump’s executive order against birthright citizenship, and the growing call among the far-right to end the H-1B program.

In the political discourses about the H-1B, Indian tech workers’ groups have mostly condemned Senator Sanders’s labeling of them as cheap labor and the thinly veiled assertion that the workers are unqualified for their high-skill jobs. Indian tech workers on H-1B have expressed fear that such labeling would empower racist groups across the political spectrum and intensify risks of physical and verbal assaults against Indian immigrant families, including their children in schools.

Treacherous Path to Solidarity
Despite the resentment and recrimination, U.S. labor unions and Indian immigrant tech workers’ organizations can pursue solidarity. Both parties have primarily been mobilizing against tech oligarchs and the neoliberal state, as well as demanding better labor and citizenship rights. I present three recommendations for solidarity for each group below:

Recommendations for U.S. Labor Unions
– First, if U.S. labor unions are serious about seeking pro-labor immigration reform, particularly reform of the H-1B program, they must work with the visa-holding workers, instead of implying that the latter steal American jobs. Otherwise, their so-called concern for Asian tech workers in the “indentured” system becomes disingenuous. Various H-1B immigrant groups have been seeking reform in ways that would help U.S.-born workers, too. For example, Immigration Voice and other similar groups have run extensive advocacy campaigns seeking support for the EAGLE Act of 2022 and the Immigration Visa Efficiency and Security Act of 2023 (HR6542). Both proposed laws included clauses against wage depression. Indian immigrant tech labor organizers have repeatedly stressed how the H-1B visa depresses immigrants’ wages and thus all workers’ wages in the U.S. labor market; and how Indian workers’ prolonged exclusion from U.S. citizenship incentivizes tech companies to hire more immigrants instead of U.S.-born workers. But the U.S. labor unions’ statements about the H-1B visa in recent years present no acknowledgment of those discourses from the other side. In a public meeting convened on X (formerly Twitter) on February 15, 2025, Aman Kapoor, the founder of Immigration Voice, lamented, “[US-born workers] attack Indian workers without realizing we are on the same side.”

Here, U.S. labor unions must also be transparent about the racial hierarchies that still underpin U.S. labor and immigration governance. Instead of blaming H-1B visa holders—code word for Asian workers—of robbing Black and Latino workers’ STEM jobs, they must acknowledge that white workers still hold the majority of STEM jobs in the United States.

Relatedly, labor unions and pro-labor lawmakers must clarify the racial, gendered, and colonial nuances of the term cheap labor. The term cheap labor is not a reflection of the unskilled and unqualified status of workers, and it does not exclusively refer to workers in low-income positions. Instead, many labor scholars have reminded us that the term cheap labor implies various mechanisms of capitalism that cheapen or devalue labor.[34]

Indian immigrant tech workers end up in cheap labor positions not because they are unskilled and unqualified. Instead, their racialized status as non-white workers from a postcolonial Global South country subjects them to prolonged exclusion from citizenship rights in the United States, leading to labor devaluation or cheapening. It may be appropriate to call Indian immigrant tech workers “high-income cheap labor.”[35] The term spotlights the class-differentiated mechanisms of labor devaluation in U.S. immigration, without conflating H-1B workers with more vulnerable low-income immigrant labor groups.

– Second, U.S. labor unions must stop stereotyping immigrant workers as poor, undocumented and unskilled. A vast number of immigrant workers—regardless of their documented, undocumented, or liminal status[36]—are educated, qualified, and hold skills that may be highly valued in the U.S. labor market. Immigrant workers should not have to be in low-income jobs to earn union support. Low-wage and legally vulnerable immigrants indeed need urgent attention. But when unions distance themselves from high-income yet precariously positioned immigrants, and extend support to only economically weaker immigrant groups, that support no longer means solidarity— it means saviorism.[37]

This shift in perspective may help U.S. unions to come to terms with the fast-evolving nature of labor precarity. They need to realize that high-income jobs may be precarious, and many high-income immigrant workers need and even seek union representation. It is pointless to lump high-income immigrants like Indian tech workers with their billionaire bosses and mark them as enemies.

– Finally, it is important for U.S. labor unions to keep abreast of various visa programs and immigration laws and policies. Senator Sanders’s statement about H-1B visas, for instance, clearly revealed his lack of knowledge about the complexities of the program. He wrote very narrowly about the H-1B program in the context of tech jobs. The AFL-CIO’s recent statements about the H-1B program and its impacts, too, have been similarly imprecise. U.S. labor unions must learn—and educate lawmakers—about the vast scope of each U.S. visa program. Approximately half of the H-1B visas, for instance, are issued to a range of essential workers including doctors, nurses, academics, scientists, and even non-profit workers who have a variety of skills, along with their global insights and lived experiences.[38] The goals and the contexts for claims-making vary across these professions and industries. An H-1B visa-holding doctor’s needs and access to political opportunities may be very different from that of an H-1B tech worker.[39]

Recommendations for Indian Immigrant Tech Workers
– First, Indian immigrant organizations representing tech workers on H-1B visas may seek out at least some short-term coalitions with labor unions. Unions like SEIU and UNITEHERE, with high representation of immigrant workers among its members, could be potential allies. These unions have generally acknowledged the importance of high-skilled visa programs and the contributions of immigrant workers to high-skill jobs.[40]

– Second, Indian immigrant tech workers and their organizations must stop surrendering to dominant racist ideologies. To emphasize their worthiness for U.S. citizenship and to seek support from U.S. lawmakers, Indian H-1B visa holders often distance themselves from undocumented immigrants, as well as Chinese, Mexican, and Black communities. Conflicts among minoritized racial groups over scarce resources are inevitable in any racially divided society.41 But in the long run, Indian immigrants on H-1B must realize that such conflicts further weaken minoritized groups and strengthen white supremacist ideologies. Therefore, H-1B tech labor groups must organize some solidarity-based projects with other racial minorities—at least in states or districts where it is politically feasible. One of the groups that I have studied (Bengali Women’s Forum) has successfully organized such small local events in collaboration with other Asian American and Pacific Islander communities with enthusiastic participation from all community members.

– Finally, while seeking U.S. workers’ support for immigration reform, Indian immigrant activists need to clarify how Indian H-1B visa holders’ naturalization to U.S. citizenship and better labor rights could benefit other racial and ethnic groups. Currently, most Indian tech workers’ organizations in the United States try to explain to their audience how immigration reform could help “American workers.” But the U.S. labor force is so diverse and fragmented that the message remains ambiguous. By clarifying how immigration reform might impact specific ethnic and racial groups among U.S.-born workers, Indian tech workers may also receive support from unions and worker centers that represent those labor demographics.

Overall, neither resentment nor endless recriminations will help U.S. unions and immigrant workers in their struggle for rights and dignity. Perhaps solidarity and mutual respect will.

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Notes
1. Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, “Trump Officials Issue Quotas to ICE Officers to Ramp Up Arrests,” The Washington Post, January 26, 2025, available at http://washingtonpost.
com/immigration/2025/01/26/ice-arrests-raids-trump-quota/.
2. Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson, “Labor Unions and Undocumented Immigrants: Local Perspectives on Transversal Solidarity during DACA and DAPA,” Critical Sociology 47, no. 6 (2020): 941-55.
3. Sofya Aptekar and Shannon Gleeson, “Framing the Immigrant in Labor Unions and the Military in the United States,” Critical Sociology (2024), doi:10.1177/08969205241301064.
4. Ruth Milkman, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020).
5. AFL-CIO, “AFL-CIO President: Trump’s Unprecedented Attack on Immigrant Workers and their Families Weaken America,” January 21, 2025, available at https://aflcio.org/press/releases/afl-cio-president-trumps-unprecedented-attack-immigrant-workers-and-their-families.
6. AFL-CIO (Department for Professional Employees), “The H-1B Temporary Visa Program’s Impact on Diversity in STEM,” 2020, available at https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-h-1b-temporary-visa-programs-impact-on-diversity-in-stem.
7. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (USEEOC), “High Tech, Low Inclusion: Diversity in the High Tech Workforce and Sector 2014-2022,” 2024.
8. While most of these groups are male-dominated, they have moderate to significant representation of caste and religious minorities, even in leadership positions. Group members are also politically diverse.
9. The term “skilled” here implies having skills that are recognized and valued by the state and employers. I do not imply that “skilled” immigrants are superior in any way to other immigrants.
10. In 2023, almost half of the H-1B visas (49.8 percent) were approved for “professional, scientific, and technical services” (tech jobs) and the other half were distributed among workers in education, finance, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and other sectors. From 2009 to 2023, the annual average of H-1B visas issued for tech jobs was 51.25 percent. Conor Gowder, “Useful Stats: A Look at the H-1B Visa Program by Industry, Employer and State,” SSTI, October 26, 2023.
11. A variety of other visas like F-1 OPT, L1 and J1 feed into the stream of “skilled” immigrant labor. Indian and Chinese immigrants represent the majority in these visas as well.
12. USEEOC, “High Tech, Low Inclusion: Diversity in the High Tech Workforce and Sector 2014-2022.”
13. Sharmila Rudrappa, “Cyber-Coolies and Techno-Braceros: Race and Commodification of Indian Information Technology Guest Workers in the United States,” University of San Francisco Law Review 44, Fall (2009): 353-72; Rianka Roy, “Covert Carcerality for ‘High-Income Cheap Labor’: Indian Immigrant Tech Workers in the United States,” Sociological Forum 40 (2024): 50-64, doi:10.1111/socf.13028.
14. Payal Banerjee, “Indian Information Technology Workers in the United States: The H-1B Visa, Flexible Production, and the Racialization of Labor,” Current Sociology 32, no. 2-3 (2006): 425-45; Rudrappa, “Cyber-Coolies and Techno-Braceros: Race and Commodification of Indian Information Technology Guest Workers in the United States.”
15. Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, “H-1B Visas and Prevailing Wage Levels,” Economic Policy Institute, 2023, available at https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wage-levels/.
16. Dorothee Schneider, “Symbolic Citizenship, Nationalism and the Distant State: The United States Congress in the 1996 Debate on Immigration Reform,” Citizenship Studies 4, no. 3 (2000): 255-73; Rianka Roy, Bandana Purkayastha, and Elizabeth Chacko, “‘We Cannot Go There, They Cannot Come Here’: Dispersed Care, Asian Indian Immigrant Families and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Social Sciences 13, no. 5 (2024): 252.
17. Pallavi Banerjee, The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (New York University Press, 2022).
18. Dependent family members of employment-based Green Card applicants are counted in the employment-based Green Card category.
19. David J. Bier, “150-Year Wait for Indian Immigrants with Advanced Degrees,” Cato Institute, June 8, 2023, available at https:// www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-immigrants-advanced-degrees.
20. Janice Fine and Daniel Tichenor, “A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration, 1866–2007,” Studies in American Political Development 23, no. 1 (2009): 84-113.
21. Janice Fine, Victor Narro, and J. Barnes, “Understanding Worker Center Trajectories,” in No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy and Movement in a New Economic Age, ed. Janice Fine, Linda Burnham, Kati Griffith, Minsun Ji, Victor Narro, and Steven Pitts (Cornell University Press, 2018), 7-38.
22. Andrew Stevens and Vincent Mosco, “Prospects for Trade Unions and Labour Organisations in India’s IT and ITES Industries,” Work Organization, Labor & Globalization 4, no. 2 (2010): 39-59.
23. Mobina Hashmi, “Outsourcing the American Dream? Representing the Stakes of IT Globalization,” Economic and Political Weekly, 41, no. 3 (2006): 21-27.
24. Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury, “US Killer Asked  Visa Status of Indians before Shooting,” The Economic Times, February 27, 2025, available at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/nris-in-news/us-killer-asked-visa-status-of-indians-before-shooting/articleshow/57363937.cms?from=mdr.
25. Musk himself is one of the major tech employers who hires workers on H-1B. His support for the H-1B program has irked anti-immigrant Trump supporters.
26. Children of H-1B visa-holding parents “age out” of their “dependent” visas at 21 years. Many Indian parents, whose children are not US citizens, face this problem of aging out. Theparents take decades to receive their U.S. citizenship—long enough for their children to turn 21 years old. After aging out, these adult children enter the same cycle of indentured visas as their parents. See Roy, “Covert Carcerality for ‘High-Income Cheap Labor.’”
27. AFL-CIO, “The H-1B Temporary Visa Program’s Impact on Diversity in STEM.” See also Aptekar and Gleeson, “Framing the Immigrant in Labor Unions and the Military in the United States.”
28. Bernard Sanders, “News: We Need Major Reforms in the H-1B Program,” US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, January 2, 2025.
29. Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Dalia Gebrial, “Racial Platform Capitalism: Empire, Migration and the Making of Uber in London,” EPA: Economy and Space 56, no. 4 (2022): 1170-194; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (UNC Press, 1983/2000).
30. Edna Bonacich, Sabrina Alimahomed, and Jake B. Wilson, “The Racialization of Global Labor,” American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 3 (2008), 342-55.
31. Banerjee, The Opportunity Trap; Roy, “Covert Carcerality for ‘High-Income Cheap Labor’”; Bandana Purkayastha and Rianka Roy, “Hidden in Plain Sight: ‘Neutral’ Enclosures for High-Skilled Immigrants during COVID-19,” Sociological Forum, 38, no. 4(2023): 1176-197.
32. Senator Sanders has also not clarified how the rigorous, increasingly expensive, lengthy and multi-pronged vetting process of each H-1B application by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Department of Labor, and Department of State could allow tech employers to hire dog trainers on H-1B visas—even during Democratic rule.
33. Immigration Voice is highly critical of Democratic lawmakers Zoe Lofgren (California) and Dick Durbin (Illinois). The organization has unequivocally accused both senators of blocking the nearly passed EAGLE Act. Immigration Voice runs the website DurbinIsRacist.com documenting the members’ grievances against Senator Durbin.
34. Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism.
35. Roy, “Covert Carcerality for ‘High-Income Cheap Labor.’”
36. Cecilia Menjívar, “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 4 (2006): 999-1037.
37. Aptekar and Gleeson, “Framing the Immigrant in Labor Unions and the Military in the United States”; Janice Fine, “A Marriage Made in Heaven? Mismatches and Misunderstandings between Worker Centers and Unions,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 45, no. 2 (2007): 335-60.
38. Gowder, “Useful Stats.”
39. Banerjee, The Opportunity Trap.
40. Rianka Roy, “Immigrant Workers Movements in the US: Where are High-Skilled ‘Nonimmigrants’?” Sociology Compass 16, no. 6(2022): e12985.
41. Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000).

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Author Biography
Rianka Roy is an assistant professor of sociology at Wake Forest University. She studies the impacts of globalization and technology on labor, migration and labor movements.