US visa policy changes, social media vetting raise concerns for Pune students regarding their re-entry
For many Indians living in the United States, the thought of travelling home to visit loved ones has become filled with uncertainty and anxiety regarding their return. Recent visa policies introduced in the past year have exacerbated these concerns.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the suspension of student visa processing in May to prepare for more extensive screening measures. Processing resumed a month later with the implementation of social media vetting, which required foreign applicants to provide open access to all their social media accounts, associating this requirement to national security concerns.
While former policies already involved limited social media checks, new measures assess applicants' potential risks and is a wider vetting process. 'Now that they're going through social media, another complexity is added,' says Anuradha Gupta, 18, a student from Pune studying in California.
'If you're a part of any political or activist organisation, they would consider it as instigating the public, and you'd get deported. University organisations have advised us not to come back, and because I did, I'm scared that I'll get to customs and borders and they won't let me in even though I have all of my student documents,' says Gupta.
The US administration began abruptly revoking foreign students' visas without notice in April through Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) terminations reported by universities nationwide. SEVIS, a government system used to monitor non-immigrant students and exchange visitors, was reinstated within the month, but the volatility of the situation alarmed international students.
'Many people suggested that I stay back in the US,' says Raghav Shetty, 18, a student from Pune studying in Minnesota.
'There was a lot of uncertainty because there were days when you would wake up to find out that some of the SEVIS records had been terminated, and then a few days later, they said that the records had been restored.' Shetty explains.
Such varying policies put students at risk of being affected by unknown changes at any point, making it harder to return home. While Isha Agarwal, 18, a student from Pune studying in California, acknowledged this, she felt it to be a calculated risk.
'When I came back, I took a risk because immigration policies are changing every day. But I don't have a public social media presence, haven't participated in political activities and haven't had any interaction with the police,' says Agarwal.
However, she further elaborates on the impact of changing policies on students. 'There shouldn't be a problem, and I'm not on an immigrant visa, but there are international travel policies that are also risky, especially for international students and their return.'
While students are wary of their return, working professionals living seem to be more confident about their return to the US. 'I, personally, have not faced any significant issues related to visa uncertainty,' says Nishant Chitkara, 25.
The H1B Modernisation Final Rule, introduced by the Department of Homeland Security in January, aimed to streamline the visa review and approval process for working professionals.
'I'm on an H1B and feel stable in my current situation. I don't have any concerns about my ability to move back to India if needed. I've never had to cancel any travel plans out of fear. I do plan my trips based on holidays and work constraints, and I keep the number of visits limited, but not due to concerns about re-entry or job security,' Chitkara says.
(Antara Kulkarni and Riddhi Berry are interns with The Indian Express)
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First Post
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Nimisha Priya's execution in Yemen delayed: How blood money has saved Indians on death row
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New Indian Express
4 hours ago
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'I don't see Indians coming back saying we want to build a new India now'
A record 23000 millionaires left India in the past one decade. That's roughly over 2000 a year. This is over and above the millions of students and professionals migrating overseas every year. But despite the rise in the drain of knowledge and now wealth, there's hardly any attempt to quantify the impact of it. A new book, Secession of the Successful, extensively chronicles the reasons behind it. The New Indian Express spoke to its author, Sanjaya Baru, who's also a political commentator and policy analyst, for further insights. Excerpts: Migration has been there, as you mentioned in your book, since the reign of the Cholas. What triggered you to write the book right now? Is it really a matter of policy concern now? Was it not earlier? Well, first of all, you are right that migration is a natural phenomenon for centuries, right from the beginning, and people have moved all over the world. So that's not what I'm looking at. I'm looking at a phenomenon of fairly large-scale migration, which is something we see happening right now, with literally thousands and thousands of people migrating. And in the case of India, this kind of large-scale migration happened in three phases. The first phase was during the British rule, when, from around the middle of the 19th century till the first quarter of the 20th century, large numbers of Indians were taken as indentured labour to various colonies of the British empire. In fact, millions of Indians went to places ranging from Fiji in the Pacific and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname and they constitute what we call the persons of Indian origin. This is about 20 million people around the world. But in the middle of the 70s after the oil crisis, when the Gulf boom and huge construction work started across the Gulf, large numbers of Indians went in search of work. Of course, Hyderabad (where this interview happened) was one of the places from which they went. Kerala and Karnataka also saw large numbers of people going and literally again millions and now we have about 8 million Indians living in the Gulf region. So, this is the second wave of essentially skilled or unskilled workers migrating. Around the same time in the 70s, we saw a process by which middle-class professionals, doctors and engineers started migrating. That was facilitated initially by the decision of the United States to liberalise their immigration policy because they needed these doctors and engineers and they looked at India as a source. But that process skyrocketed after 1999, when you had the Y2K problem with the computer systems around the world having to switch from 1999 to 2000 and India had lots of trained computer software guys and engineers. So, companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, they all came up responding to this demand. That was another wave and now we have literally again millions of Indians working in this space across the English-speaking world. Mostly the US, but also other countries. What I now record in this book particularly, is what we have seen happening essentially over the last 10 years with Indians beginning to migrate. According to one study, 23,000 millionaires have migrated in the last 10 years and more and more countries are selling their citizenship. They are offering golden visas, they are offering permanent residence and Indians are taking advantage of that. So, I call this the fourth phase and it is this that I've recorded, what I would like to call the changing class composition of emigration from India. Twenty-three thousand is a huge number and this you say was in the last decade alone. What about earlier, I mean prior to 10 years ago, were the numbers negligible? Well, there wasn't much movement of the super rich. So what you see in the second phase from the 80s, 90s up to the 2000s, and its first decade is essentially middle-class professionals working in a range of professions migrating, mainly doctors and engineers but also those in the field of finance, in sciences, so across different professions. The emigration of the wealthy is a recent phenomenon. So are we also to understand that the number of millionaires has grown proportionally? Yes, I mean all the data shows that the early 2000s were what we call the boom years, when the Indian economy recorded the highest rates of growth from 2003 to 2012. During those nine years, we saw eight percent growth—during the last year of Prime Minister Vajpayee's tenure and the first term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. You had eight to nine percent growth for almost a decade—those were the boom years. That process generated a lot of wealth and that wealth generation went on for some more time, even till the Covid-19 pandemic. A large number of Indians made substantial amount of money and that is how the top five percent of the population has become richer and we talk about inequality, the widening gap between the bottom 50 percent and the top five percent, that is a recent phenomenon. There have been concerns that growth has been pretty subdued in the past one decade. If more and more number of millionaires are moving out, the number of the rich should also reduce. But the number of rich is only rising... Well, that's an interesting question. Economists talk of post-Covid K-shaped growth. So, K-shaped growth essentially means that the growth process is divergent, that in fact the rich are becoming richer. The poor may not be getting poorer but they're certainly not getting any richer. So this gap is widening and economists refer to this as the K-shaped recovery. So, the growth rates have come down. I mean from eight percent to an average of now around six in the immediate post-Covid period, even lower at four percent or so. At the higher income levels, people have still been able to retain their shares, so it's not as if it has affected the super rich. You see it for example in the auto market and particularly in a city like Hyderabad, it stares you in your face. The number of BMWs, Mercedes and Audis on the road is increasing but when it comes to entry-level cars, we find companies saying they are not able to sell them. So, it tells you that this is the gap that is emerging. Millionaires moving out, is this a phenomenon seen in India alone? We also see that in other countries and millionaires everywhere do explore moving to other destinations either because of tax benefits or other societal reasons. This phenomenon is not limited to India, is it? It's a phenomenon we see in many countries. We saw it particularly for a long time in China where literally thousands of millionaires emerged because of the high rates of economic growth and many of them moved out to Singapore, they moved out to the US, they moved out to Europe. So, there was a movement of the Chinese millionaires. We saw that in Russia too. But when millionaires from China and Russia were moving out, the western media would say these are not free societies. So, once you have money, people want to leave. Now we are supposed to be a free society and yet once people make a lot of money, they want to leave. So, I draw attention to the fact but what we also see is, even in developed countries, people are leaving. I mean England for example is finding a lot of very wealthy British, English people moving out to other countries because they find tax rates are too high in England. So, it's true, it's not a phenomenon confined to India but certainly it's a new phenomenon in India and is worth understanding, which is why I wrote about it. You have mentioned a variety of reasons for millionaires moving out. Can you list out them briefly and what do you think we need to do to stem the tide? Well, you know frankly the most important reason is quite simple. It is what we call ease of living. If you can afford to live in a place where the ease of living is more, then why would you continue to live in a place where the ease of living is less. In some ways it's similar to the migration that happens within a country. When people move from say rural area to urban area or from a city like let's say Patna to a city like Delhi, you see even within a country people moving in search of ease of living, better opportunities. So that's happening at the global level and that is why you need to address the whole question of how do you improve the ease of living in order to be able to retain not just your wealthy... I mean wealthy is only one part of the secession I talk about but I am more concerned about the migration of the brainy people, or the talented. It's the brain drain and I'm looking at both the challenge of brain drain and wealth drain. Wealth drain is a problem, but I don't think we should only worry about wealth, we should also worry about the number of talented people leaving the country in search of better opportunities. But does India not have enough opportunities to accommodate these professionals? Could the lack of options also be one reason why professionals are leaving? So, isn't the onus on the government or the private sector to create opportunities? Absolutely, I mean the onus is certainly on us at home, on governments, state governments, central government, private sector, institutions, universities, and research laboratories. The onus is on us to improve conditions here that make it attractive for talented people to remain in India. So, I make two points on this. One, the challenge for the government is in fact to retain talented people. On the other hand, we find governments are now actually encouraging the export of talented people. I mentioned the fact that recently the foreign minister launched a private-sector initiative called Gati -- Global access for talented Indians. Why should the government be assisting a private company that's exporting talented Indians? Let's also look at Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Hyderabad has become a very important centre along with Bangalore and Gurgaon. GCCs right now are essentially catering to multinationals. They're working for American multinationals and I make the point, there is a chapter called Indians in MAGA (Make America Great Again). So, actually Indians are contributing either directly living in the United States or indirectly working for American companies for making America great again. So, how do we make India great again using this talent and what should we do at home in order to be able to attract talent? That's the question I guess. The migration of professionals has been happening for the last many decades, as you mentioned. It started in the 70s, 80s. So many decades have passed. Why do you think we are unable to stop that brain drain? I think, first of all, the fact is that in the 70s and 80s, we were at least worrying about the problem. I record the fact that very distinguished economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and others were writing about brain drain, were worrying about it. They were proposing ideas for restricting brain drain. After the 80s, we simply gave up and I quote one economist called Dina Khatkate, who used to work in the International Monetary Fund and he wrote an article around that time in the Economic and Political Weekly saying that it's better for India to get rid of these people otherwise they'll be here and they'll be frustrated and frustrated people create problems. So, he suggested that the best way to manage these frustrations is to allow them to leave. I think that kind of thinking took over and when people were leaving, we said okay, you want to go, go. We were encouraging. There was no attempt to ask why they were leaving? What is it we can do to prevent them from leaving? There was no attempt to figure that out. Even today, there is very little attempt. We celebrate the Indian diaspora. The Prime Minister goes abroad all the time, meeting Indians abroad and praising them for doing so well. Why doesn't he tell them come back to India? Because he knows if he says that, they will all turn and walk away from him. It means the government is actually not interested in retaining this talent and also there are not many opportunities as such to hold this talent. I think it's all partly to do with the fact that the government is not able to inspire the talent that is leaving. In fact, I quote Devesh Kapoor, who's a very distinguished economist in the US, who talks about why would the elite prevent elite migration. After all, what is happening? These are the Indian elite. Professionals come from the top 5%. That's the elite that's running the country. If you look at the entire leadership of various sectors, business, government, politics, academia, and you ask people, where are your children? An increasing number would tell you they are overseas. So, it's the elite that is actually migrating. So, how would you expect a government run by this elite to prevent the migration when their own children are leaving? I think the other issue is a more serious one which is that there was a sense of nationalism. A real nationalism, not the pseudo-nationalism that we now see with all this Bharat Mata ki Jai stuff. In the 50s, after independence, when very distinguished Indians came back to India, I mean Homi Bhabha came and built the nuclear programme. People like Vikram Sarabhai came and built your space programme. Meghnad Saha, Jnan Chandra Ghosh, all these very eminent scientists, mathematicians, physicists, etc came back to India in the 50s because they were inspired by this whole idea of India being independent, having thrown the British out, and wanting to build a new India. I don't see that sentiment today. I don't see Indians coming back and saying we want to build a new India. They are all sitting outside and saying India is going to be the fourth largest economy in the world, right? But we will be outside. As you mentioned in the book, Jagdish Bhagwati had proposed an idea to tax migrants. Do you think we should revive it at least in some form? I don't think it will work now. You see, first of all, when countries are giving you citizenship at a price, you will pay the tax and buy the citizenship because there is now that money. In fact, Bhagwati himself came to the conclusion that this is not going to work. There could be certain sensitives introduced in certain lines of activity where you make it not easy to go. So, people have to think twice. But I don't think today you can actually prevent immigration by any governmental measurements. I think you will need a change of attitude and most importantly you need to improve the ease of living here. You need to make people feel that life is good for me in India. Why should I go? That feeling has to come into people. Do you think as a reverse psychology, should India also consider selling golden visas to expats? There was a time around 2000s when the IT industry was booming and companies like Satyam and TCS, brought in a lot of expats who moved to India lock, stock and barrel. Even smaller countries like Antigua are offering citizenship for a price... Well, you don't have to sell visas. If you actually make it attractive for people to work in Indian institutions, a lot of people would come. Recently, the Nobel laureate Venkatesh Ramakrishnan gave an interview in which he has mentioned that a lot of scientists are leaving the United States because of Donald Trump's cost cutting. He's firing lots of people. So, they're looking for jobs outside the US and they're looking for opportunities in Europe and other parts of the world and he said that I wish India could attract some of those scientists but that will require making Indian science institutions more attractive places to work in and they've all become very bureaucratic. Joint secretaries and deputy secretaries sitting in Delhi are lording over academic institutions, universities, research institutions. So, there's a feeling among scientists that it's not easy to do research in India. There are too many constraints. So, if you ease these constraints and make it attractive for people to work in India, they will come and this idea is actually quite an old one. I mentioned recently somewhere that it was being talked about as far back as in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992, K Subrahmanyam who was a foreign policy strategy analyst in those days and the father of foreign minister Jaishankar wrote an article suggesting India should attract the Russian talent that was leaving Russia because of the end of the Soviet Union and arrival of Yeltsin. The reasons were the same. Cutting down salaries, cutting down government spending. A lot of Russian scientists were leaving and where did they go? They all went to the United States and Subrahmanyam was saying why don't you bring some of them here to work in India but it didn't happen then. It will not happen now. Yeah, there's plenty of opportunity even now in India. Absolutely. So, what exactly should we do then? There's a spurt of HNIs (High net worth individuals) and that is happening thanks to growth whether they are working outside or in India. How do we address this problem? Well, both the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister put out two ideas last year. The Prime Minister in his Independence Day speech spoke about launching a mission for the ease of living in India. The Finance Minister in her budget speech talked about setting up a commission for deregulation or reducing the regulatory raj. These are things to do. They know what has to be done. They just have to do it. The simple things need to be fixed. My friend Sucheta Dalal, who is a financial journalist, has been writing for a long time about the KYC norms of banks. It's such a nuisance. Nowhere in the world are people harassed having to fill forms. To get your own money, you have to fill forms. So, reduce all that nonsense. Make it easier for people to live, to do business. You have been talking about the ease of business for 10 years. People have been talking about ease of business. Now, they're talking about ease of living or ending regulation raj. I think people in government know what has to be done. It's not as if there's no knowledge in the government. The question is somebody has to take the initiative and do it. This is what Narasimha Rao did in 1991. Go back to 1991. What did Narasimha Rao do? He just implemented all the ideas that were already known. Every single policy that Narasimha Rao took up was already written about in the 80s. Economists were already writing. IG Patel, Montek, a whole lot of economists were already writing about what should be done. All of them were saying we need to do A, B, C, D. Except nobody did it. Indira Gandhi didn't do it. Rajiv Gandhi didn't do it. Chandrashekhar didn't do it. VP Singh didn't do it. Narasimha Rao came and did it. So, you need a Prime Minister who will do it. So, there's no shortage of ideas right now. Execution is where we are actually lacking? Absolutely. Any message for the policy makers from your side, because the book stops short of giving suggestions... No, no, there are the suggestions I've mentioned already. I've mentioned what needs to be done, and the message here is from Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, who has written on the back of my book, saying it's a must read for every Indian policy maker. So, let them read the book. Last question, on a lighter note, given this book is all about the Indian diaspora, will there be a soft launch overseas? No, I don't think. It's been a long time since I've travelled outside India. So, I don't see myself doing that.
