DC Edit |Trump Admin Going After Indians To Win Midterms?

US Vice President J.D. Vance’s description of foreign workers as “indentured servants” of “visa mills” reflects growing xenophobia in the Donald Trump administration and worsening relations between India and the United States.

He argues that employer-linked visas, which were created under the sanction of law, leave workers vulnerable to exploitation. Yet his administration is trying to obstruct their very route to permanent residency — the status that would emancipate them from their dependence on so-called visa mills. If dependence is the problem, deepening it is a perverse remedy.

Indisputably, the US has the sovereign right to decide whom it admits. It can regulate immigration, enforce employment standards and prosecute fraud. However, sovereignty is no defence for selective outrage, unfounded accusations or rules that punish people, such as foreign students and legally admitted workers, who organised their lives around an existing legal framework.

A proposal to collect a fee of $70,000 from foreign students for initial Optional Practical Training and $30,000 for a subsequent extension is patently unfair and immoral.

Though these measures are still at the proposal stage, levying such hefty fees on students who have already enrolled in American universities based on existing legal provisions would upend their choices and potentially throw many of them into deep financial distress.

Though a student visa guarantees no employment, the US administration should not change the terms of a visa retrospectively. If it believes foreign students are adversely affecting the interests of US citizens, it should change the terms of the F-1 visa, including scrapping OPT, from the next academic year. But it should desist from changing the rules of the game midway.

The Trump administration’s decision to suspend eight companies, including two American and six Indian companies, from the Permanent Labour Certification programme (PERM) over alleged misuse of employment-based immigration programmes appears to be mostly targeted at Indian companies.

While it is not for India to lobby the US to grant green cards to its citizens, who are not stateless, New Delhi must oppose the selective targeting of Indian citizens and companies to appeal to the administration’s core MAGA voter base ahead of the midterm elections to Congress.

Officials in the Trump administration and the MAGA ecosystem should not forget that the United States was founded by immigrants who came from around the world. If previous leaders in Washington or Philadelphia had shut out immigrants, neither Trump nor Vance could have called themselves American, a term that rightfully belongs to Native Americans who were persecuted in their own land for hundreds of years.

An analysis of the 2026 Fortune 500 shows that 229 companies — nearly 46 per cent — were founded by immigrants or their children. Together, they employed 15.3 million people worldwide. Immigrants have helped create the businesses on which American prosperity rests; treating them as a threat wilfully ignores that record.

If companies have hired foreign workers primarily for wage arbitrage and have acted against the law, the Trump administration should act against them instead of denigrating people and imputing servitude to them. If all Indians settled in the US were to return to their motherland with their talent and money, it would be immensely beneficial to India, as it would turbocharge its economy and speed up its rise. The biggest casualty, however, would be the India-US strategic partnership.