On January 20, as Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States of America, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, sat in the front row of attendees at the inauguration, occasionally applauding for the incoming president. Speaking to reporters shortly after, Jaishankar said the Trump administration was “clearly prioritising” its relationship with India. Smiling, he said that he had been “treated very well” by his hosts.
That’s good for him, but a week later it is clear that the Trump administration isn’t treating most Indians in the US very well.
Even as the Indian government touts the close personal rapport between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump, the US president’s ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda has started to openly clash with the interests of many Indians in the US.
Among the series of executive orders signed by Trump right after he took office, one empowers law-enforcement authorities to deport undocumented migrants. While the popular image of Indians in the US is that of a so-called model minority, with high-paying white-collar jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Indians also constitute the third-largest set of immigrants who are in the country without legal papers: the 725,000 such Indian nationals are only behind people from Mexico and El Salvador. They are now at risk of being sent back.
Another of Trump’s orders aims to scrap birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that mandates that anyone born in the US is automatically an American citizen regardless of the citizenship of their parents. For now, a federal court has blocked that order but its implications loom large for the more than 100,000 Indians currently working in the US on work visas, predominantly the H-1B visa, many of whom harbour the American dream. As things stand, their children, if born in the US, become American citizens automatically. That will stop if Trump’s order is eventually upheld by the courts. Such is the panic around birthright citizenship that reports suggest that many Indian women in the US are seeking pre-term deliveries against the advice of doctors just so that their children are born before a ban kicks in.
The entire H-1B programme is a topic of furious debate within the MAGA movement. Trump, who had criticised it during his first term, has now said that he backs it. His ally, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has supported the visa scheme too. But many other influential voices within the MAGA movement, including the former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, have called for it to be scrapped. Even Musk has said that the programme needs to be overhauled amidst criticism that it is rigged to favour some companies and, in essence, is exploitative since imported workers — Indians form the lion’s share — are paid less than domestic workers would be paid. Musk’s electric car firm, Tesla, saw one of the sharpest increases in H-1B accepted applications in 2024; so expect the pressure on him to mount.
Whether or not the H-1B scheme and birth-right citizenship are eventually scrapped, a guillotine of uncertainty will hang over the heads of all Indians in the US who had counted on these policies while making their choice to move to America. Trump’s threat of tariffs on Indian imports remains alive too — though he has been silent on that for the past few days. While India’s diplomatic corps will try their best to safeguard the country’s interests, these warning shots from Planet Trump expose something deeper: the hollowness of some of the claims of Team Modi.
The Modi government has been insisting that India is today the economic envy of much of the world, and that when the prime minister speaks, everyone listens. Try telling that to the nearly one million Indian nationals who have — legally or illegally — moved there hoping for a better future than they believe India offers.
Therein lies the Modi government’s big challenge: it must do all it can to protect the interests of Indians vulnerable to Trump’s anti-immigrant measures while arguing that they don’t represent the glorious India that Modi is building.
Charu Sudan Kasturi is a journalist who writes on foreign policy and international relations
