The H1B Visa

A former H1B visa holder offers a blunt and personal perspective on the American immigration debate. This essay critiques the program's flaws, the hypocrisy of nationalist arguments, and the economic forces that truly shape the global tech landscape.

7/26/2025

It may be helpful if I, as a US outsider but a former H1B, add my halfwits to this debate. And even though the temperature is tepid—the heat of displeasure having displaced populously to Trump’s imagined involvement in Epstein’s pedophilia ring—the matter is still hot on both sides, internally at least, if you take the rectal temperatures of the MAGA and the job-insecure desi segment: deep-in-debt Indians in America who can’t vent either where they are or to the media back home in India. The godi media, as they have been pejoratively named, are always busy singing jingles about the greatness of the greatest king, Narendra Damodardas Modi, who started to reign in 2014. If I may be misconstrued as taking some side, I want to make my current disaffection for either group clear and say that my point is just this: there are things I know from almost a decade on the H1B—yes, two iterations of it—nuances that I can share.

Just like the amount of melanin doesn’t proffer any advantages beyond what you ought to get at the right latitudes where it matches the slant of the sun, all supremacist claims are false, including Indian or Chinese ones. Americans should know better because the entire field of computer science, outside what Alan Turing did in the UK—the cause behind the H1B tiff, categorically not biology or chemistry or physics—evolved in the US. Including AI.

The other fields of science allow even more foreigners to the US, which white supremacists or nationalists either don’t know about or conveniently avoid mentioning because the hard work required and low graduate stipends offered for research aren’t attractive to Americans and consequently filled by foreigners flooding to the US, who hope to make a scientific contribution and a living out of it.

This locus of scientific evolution, coincident in one spot, happened because, beyond speculation, hearsay, randomness, and serendipity, America is a place where the government allows lenient funding to basic science unattached to immediate profits—a system that is either impossible or far less straightforward in most of the world. This leeway given to research is why America has written most of the books on which I, as a computer science student, got my education—part of which, the master’s degree, was in America. I wasn’t the go-at-it-gung-ho type, and I wasn’t intelligent enough, but I liked what I did. I wasn’t a superior person by any means, and although the H1B is a pressure and losing it tosses your life into turmoil, solving the problems with the H1B program is imperative—for the American people—whether that’s making it more transparent, making equal status mandatory and not merely lip service in legalese, or tossing it out entirely and hiring only qualified American citizens. But it shouldn’t be about melanin content in the skin, not based on whiteness (as the MAGA fans fantasize), to be clear. And you should seriously rethink giving girls like Melanie, who was in 1998 Eastern European, Einstein visa for their looks too—considering that eventually when her husband now the president of your country is all about driving foreigners out—or is it just ugly and above a certain melanin profile?

My H1B, albeit a tumultuous and nerve-wracking journey, at least saved me from innumerable false starts, wrong turns, and from chance, luck, and unfavorable circumstances back in India, which, as a country, doesn’t care about the meritorious—in fact, just the opposite. It is a bewildering wasteland of compromised principles that fosters the poisonous or nefarious pole. You fare better in India if you are a religious person with guile, a venal politician who has no moral compass or empathy, a businessman without any scruples or discipline whatsoever, a murderous goon, or just a garden-variety vicious backstabber. The smorgasbord of fraudsters, freeloaders, and freakishly corrupt fiends is as exotic as it is astonishing. There’s no need for thinkers, honest professionals in any walk, or entrepreneurs—absolutely none whatsoever, zilch, nada, nil, zero. It’s a mélange of all that can be wrong and all at once, yet somehow gets shoveled under the superlative marketing of adulterated spices, twerking Bollywood imitation hip movements, and an inexhaustible supply of crude but proud mythology and vaingloriously romanticized lies about reality, handed down over the ages that haven’t rotted properly. Escaping India is the only educated thing an educated Indian can do when in India.

I don’t have a horse in this race—no interest in coming to the US or settling there—but the people who live within that imaginary border need to get over their illusory indoctrination, keep the good, and throw away the bad. The bad, in this case, is the dogma and the wrong approach to the issues.

It should start by understanding what kind of labor you aspire to. If you screw up Maslow’s hierarchy badly, the economy and the country suffer because you lose an engineer who is interested and engaged (note: not superior). Progress of the type we see in pyramids can’t be what we need in science. No handcuffed, blood-filled meat puppets or a lurching lifeboat full of serfs unmoored by shortsighted immigration laws can inspire greatness or catapult American civilization to a higher point. Gnashing teeth and whips engender more of the same types of antiquated backwaters that most Indians leave behind back home.

This “coming out of a relatively darker room” is what a foreigner experiences—something an American can’t—because they’re born into the light of opportunity. Coming to America is a dream to many in the world—not so to someone who’s born in America.

But it’s the choice of words, I think, that lies at the root of this issue. Programming can be a very dry business, and mathematics too. It may not be for me, but it is, by definition, not on the list of highly delectable things by any stretch. So, it was my curiosity that made me stay and work for whatever wage, as long as I liked it. I was not a careerist then, and I am still not now—just curious. Like with this blog, I’m an amateur, and I don’t draw any earnings from writing a post like this, I write, I sketch, I do whatever I do because I like to do them. Two words both start with the third alphabet of the English language, but have separate life trajectories and force different choices.

If the debate is right, the first debate should be about the minimum wage and why no one bothers to raise it when that would be more important and perhaps radically more jingoistic to billionaire ears, who are disproportionately rich, but here’s the thing, you’ll never hear this being raised, even though these are mostly white Americans, again, you are looking at the wrong people for solutions—the billionaires will never fight your fight—they will only pretend and say equivocal shit like politicians do, but you’re just a stupid whore if you don’t know bamboozling billionaire beneficence is bullshit concocted lore. Hey I rhymed! High five MAGA!

And just like the year 2000 problem brought Indians and other foreigners in droves to America, the year 2025 may be the year when America might not need foreigners—heck, humans in general. But the few Indians or foreigners who will be needed will be the incredibly few curious ones. Again, this has nothing to do with how they smell or how much melanin their skin has, but with their vision for the future. America allows this to happen. People like Elon—although he may be a little crazy—are still some of those people. But he is visible for the wrong reasons, primarily because he has money. The real merit he has is that he is a futurist, and that is what we need—or more benign ones like him. But MAGA, you’ve got to manage your expectations. Sociopath billionaires can be absolutist, sure! But never free speech absolutist, not your speech, fuck no—in any case, that phrase sounds contrived, like the refrain he’s a jolly good fellow, when we know such creatures went extinct with the black-and-white television. What have you been smoking, MAGA?

Life is nuanced; shit is always layered and more complicated. Making America great again cannot be a binary choice involving cult-like obedience and subservience. Debates and disagreements are necessary and good; they also throw light on how fragile everyday assumptions are, or you wouldn’t be crying foul over corrupt and colluding politicians or reneging billionaires.

We (by that, I mean Homo sapiens) need to work together on this rock until we have a Planet B—or a more livable Planet A—regardless of melanin content, no matter how much worse my shit stinks compared to somebody else’s. Homo sapiens can only survive if it cooperates; otherwise, it won’t.

The truth isn’t what I depict in the cartoon above in a corporeal sense—it’s just a metaphor for the reality inside the white supremacist’s head. In the end, they will get embittered by Vivek Ramaswamy or anyone brown. To MAGA, who are often pursuant to bandwagon thinking—it might appear Vivek thinks he is white. But MAGA, is wrong, Vivek is white socioeconomically. And not the diminutive white definition that he hinted H1B replaced, but the white rich business elite of Indian descent who aligns with certain conservative and nationalist viewpoints for his own selfish interests.

And therefore it isn’t strange given the white supremacist leaning in MAGA, the disaffection for his Indian lineage, or their affection to Elon (from South Africa), the guy who literally bought political and business proximity to Trump, or Rupert Murdoch (from Australia), who peddles their obscurantism and lies (white lies, in this case), simply because they are white.

Unfortunately, MAGA will have to bend over and spread their gluteus maximus maximally because the reason all the juicy, low-hanging IT and AI jobs may be hard to find in America, which they want to do as opposed to fruit-picking or other labor jobs considered menial, which they don’t—is that the billionaires don’t want unions, or people leaving for another job, or to have to concede to paying for all the benefits like health insurance, etc., or to preclude hassles that come with US citizen who often speak up or have the social, moral and legal eligibility to fight workplace injustice.

Of course the injustice doesn’t end inside the H1B. Not only are qualified Americans displaced, as it so often happens in closed cliques—even in this Indian serfdom, you mostly get South Indians, with very few from other parts of the Indian subcontinent—not because there’s something inherently special, but because they don’t want other Indians for reasons of comfort and language. There are many exceptions, but Indian South Indian and Indian North Indian are two distinct tribes, united only in their shared equality in corruption and mutual dislike for each other. But to keep slaves under one whip the hiring usually has to be from the same tribe, code conversant but otherwise illiterate, preferably god fearing, and South Indians exploit other South Indians to their level best. Bengalis do to Bengalis, and so on, once you have one culture in, from one part of India, that culture and not merit is what decides which Indian gets an H1B. Being outspoken makes me a pariah in the Indian IT community, because inherently here the mindsets are of British post-colonial serfs. Anyone with the audacity to challenge this status quo is immediately an outcast—fuck you is my obliging reaction to such abhorrent and ancient decrepitude. Always remember people who know you more wanna fuck you more, so it’s always safer to hang in mixed crowds, as in life, so in IT.

If you’re on H-1B, you can’t say anything even if they have many heads up your ass, or you have to leave—indentured, blood-filled meat puppets is what I said. When I had Jesus Christ’s head shoved up my ass at the Texas Veterans Administration in San Antonio, I quit. Most Indians don’t have the balls. I do, and mine are defiant, asymmetrical, small, brown, and hairy.

But billionaires are holding the country at ransom with impunity—they always have—and MAGA might just have to buy more Vaseline, as they had done before. Like when all the manufacturing jobs left the US: if they raise their voice too much, the billionaires will just set up a shell operation in the US and get everything done offshore—outsourced entirely, maybe on somewhere remote—like Jeffrey Epstein’s private Fucking Little Saint James island, but located in Asia somewhere this time, and populated with Indians and slaves instead of little girls, from any other sad country which can be taken advantage of, because these countries also, like America, don’t give a shit about their citizens. It’s always the rich and powerful that win, because we let them.

By the way, even the Vaseline is probably made somewhere else—but buy it anyway, MAGA, because these large, bulbous, throbbing, hairy cocks are going to be in your ass for quite a long while. Holy Hallelujah!