Last month, three distinct centres of American political power moved against Indian immigration and, by extension, against the human foundation of the US-India strategic partnership. On 15 April, Vice President JD Vance stood before conservative college students in Georgia and said there’s been a ninety per cent administrative cut in H-1B visas, urging them to demand that Senate primary candidates commit to abolishing the programme entirely. On 22 April, Congressman Eli Crane introduced the End H-1B Visa Abuse Act, a seventy-one-page bill seeking a three-year moratorium on new H-1B visas, the elimination of Optional Practical Training, the abolition of dependent visas, and a $200,000 minimum salary floor that would price out the vast majority of Indian applicants. These legislative moves followed President Donald Trump’s public dismissal of the subcontinent in terms that stripped away two decades of careful diplomatic framing about shared democratic values.
This convergence was not coordinated in any operational sense. It was something more consequential: Three actors responding independently to a domestic incentive structure that now rewards anti-Indian positioning. This structure deserves close examination by Indian analysts who continue to treat American hostility as episodic or temperamental.
Trump’s rhetoric is functional, not impulsive. The MAGA base that sustains his political viability treats cultural hostility toward non-European immigration as a marker of authentic commitment. Racial animus toward Indians is not incidental; it is a feature of a political identity built on the premise that demographic change constitutes a threat to American civilisation. Every derogatory remark about the subcontinent reinforces a compact with voters for whom the point is precisely that he is willing to say it.
Vance is positioning himself as the presidential candidate for the 2028 race and has identified immigration restrictionism as the ground on which to outflank potential primary rivals from the Right. That his wife is of Indian origin makes the positioning more deliberate. It signals to the base that ideological commitment overrides even personal affinity. His Georgia address was a campaign event, not a policy speech, designed to establish that Vance will go further than any competitor on the issue that now defines Republican primary viability.
The congressional picture is equally revealing. Crane’s bill attracted 11 co-sponsors, and the composition tells a structural story. Four are from Texas: Brian Babin, Brandon Gill, Wesley Hunt, and Keith Self, representing the state with the highest H-1B concentration outside California and the one where anti-Indian yard signs have become a feature of suburban politics. Gill is married to Danielle D’Souza, of Indian origin, replicating the Vance pattern. Andy Ogles of Tennessee described the H-1B programme as a mechanism for making Americans “strangers in their own country.” Paul Gosar of Arizona called it a system “hijacked to replace American workers.”
Their strongest policy weapon is a provision most Indian observers have never encountered: Participants in the Optional Practical Training programme and their employers are exempt from Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, a combined 15.3 per cent cost advantage over hiring an American graduate.
The Freedom Caucus—a congressional caucus of the most conservative members of the Republican Party—frames this as the government rewarding firms for hiring foreigners while taxing them for hiring citizens.
These members are funded by small-dollar grassroots donors and immigration-restrictionist organisations, not by the technology industry. The traditional corporate lobby that defended skilled immigration for two decades has no leverage over the caucus driving its elimination.
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On-ground rhetoric
In Frisco, Texas, where Indian-Americans now form one of the largest and most economically successful immigrant communities, local politics has begun reflecting these tensions directly. City council meetings and community forums have seen rhetoric describing Indian professionals as demographic displacement rather than economic contributors. What was once largely confined to anonymous online spaces has entered municipal politics in one of the Republican Party’s fastest-growing suburban regions.
The trajectory of Vivek Ramaswamy complicates the picture without resolving it. Ramaswamy won the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary on 5 May this year, with 82 per cent of the vote and Trump’s full endorsement. He’s the first Indian-American to win a major party gubernatorial nomination in Ohio’s history. His primary opponent, Casey Putsch, ran explicitly as a white Christian alternative to Ramaswamy’s Indian heritage and Hindu faith. Putsch still received 18 per cent of Republican primary votes. One in five Ohio Republicans, offered a direct choice, chose the candidate who ran on Indian origin as a disqualifier. Ramaswamy’s win demonstrates that the Republican coalition can accommodate individual Indians who perform ideological loyalty at the highest level. It does not demonstrate that the coalition has made peace with Indian immigration, Indian professionals, or Indian cultural presence in American suburbs. The electoral machine is not simply anti-Indian. It is anti-Indian on its own terms, and those terms shift depending on who is useful.
The political cost within America is already visible. In Edison, New Jersey, home to one of the largest Indian-American concentrations in the country, Trump won 45 per cent of the vote in 2024. In the 2025 governor’s race, the Republican candidate managed 33 per cent. The Carnegie Endowment’s 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey confirmed the pattern nationally: A community that had been drifting toward the Republican Party is swinging back. The party is burning a constituency it spent a decade courting.
The contradiction is becoming harder to manage. The Republican Party seeks to expand support among upwardly mobile Indian-American voters, while simultaneously mobilising a political base increasingly hostile to Indian immigration and the social visibility of Indian communities in suburban America. Frisco has become one of the clearest examples of this tension playing out in public.
These domestic incentives are amplified externally. Researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute traced 61 per cent of engagement on the most virulent anti-Indian content on X to bot farms in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Russia, swarm networks capable of pushing fringe material into mainstream feeds within thirty minutes.
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What fuels it?
India’s position would be stronger if New Delhi had been more honest about its own contribution to the conditions now being exploited. The scam call centre in Ahmedabad and the fake degree mill in Delhi are Indian governance failures with American victims. The current India-US effort to combat cross-border scams is best understood as a legally-grounded but operationally-sluggish partnership, reliant on instruments like Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties and mediated through bodies such as the FBI and MEA, which delivers episodic, intelligence-driven disruptions rather than sustained, real-time suppression of scam networks.
The underlying issue stems from incentive misalignment: A police superintendent in Jharkhand has little domestic political compulsion to treat an American fraud victim’s complaint as a national priority. The MEA can send a demarche, but cannot redirect a thana’s enforcement priorities. India’s foreign policy ambitions and its domestic governance capacity operate in entirely separate worlds.
The corporate sector is a little better. The only government-conducted fraud assessment, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) study from 2008, found a 13.4 per cent confirmed fraud rate across a sample of 246 H-1B petitions and a further 7.3 per cent in technical violations. That figure is far from the 80 to 90 per cent claims circulating in American restrictionist media, but it is also far from trivial. When USCIS shifted to a beneficiary-centric lottery in 2025, registrations collapsed by forty per cent in a single cycle, revealing the scale of corporate gaming by staffing firms submitting multiple entries per candidate. In 2013, Infosys paid a record thirty-four-million-dollar settlement for systematically using visitor visas to circumvent H-1B regulations. Bloomberg reported in February 2025 that TCS had, for years, misclassified employees as managers to obtain visas reserved for intra-company transferees.
This governance gap and corporate failures have fuelled the “Indians as scammers” stereotype. They have fed a reputational verdict that now functions in American political culture the way the “Pakistanis as terrorists” frame functioned after 2001: Politically costless to invoke and nearly impossible to dislodge.
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A dent in ties
The policy consequences for Indian nationals have been systematic. The December 2025 expansion of mandatory social media vetting shut down visa appointments across all five US consulates in India, stranding hundreds of H-1B holders who had travelled home for family emergencies. The USCIS Fraud Detection division now builds audit files from LinkedIn posts, payroll records, and student visa histories, using minor inconsistencies to revoke petitions approved years earlier. As documented by the New Yorker, armed agents now wait inside USCIS interview rooms, while officers conduct routine appointments, entering to detain applicants the moment the session concludes. New job postings at the agency advertise positions called “Homeland Defenders,” with responsibilities that include “defend your culture.”
The United States built its technology dominance by attracting and retaining the world’s strongest technical talent. The Indian engineers who stayed in Silicon Valley built companies, filed patents, and sustained the innovation ecosystem that kept America ahead through two decades of intensifying Chinese competition. Washington is systematically redirecting that pipeline, and American firms are responding rationally. Unable to bring Indian engineers to California, they are building capacity in Bengaluru and Hyderabad instead. The Hoover Institution reported that the 2017 H-1B tightening, far milder than current restrictions, redirected talent to Canada and boosted Canadian exports. For every four forgone H-1B visas, one additional Canadian work permit application followed.
The redirection is generational. Three scientists from IIT Madras have built Sthyr Energy, a startup developing long-duration energy storage capable of converting electricity into metal form, storing it for months, and converting it back to power on demand. In an earlier decade, scientists of this calibre would have spent their most productive years in American university labs. As conditions in America grow more hostile and personal futures more uncertain, the calculus is shifting—not through any single decision but through the gradual accumulation of reasons to stay.
The end of the OPT programme, if Crane’s bill advances, would transform American degrees into non-transferable souvenirs for Indian graduates. That message is reshaping the aspirational calculus of an entire generation.
New Delhi’s formal response amounted to a single MEA paragraph in September 2025, noting that implications were “being studied” and expressing hope that “humanitarian consequences be addressed suitably.” A government that spent years cultivating a personal relationship with Trump cannot easily afford to contest its terms while trade deals, defence procurement, and Quad continuity depend on it.
Within hours of the H-1B fee announcement, every major Opposition party attacked Modi as weak and declared India’s foreign policy a failure. In India, foreign policy has rarely been an electoral issue. It is becoming one now.
The failure runs deeper than diplomatic caution. India’s foreign policy apparatus is designed for state-to-state negotiation. Its security establishment is calibrated for kinetic threats. Neither has developed doctrine for a hybrid threat that operates simultaneously in the information environment, in domestic American politics, in visa bureaucracy, and in the daily lives of Indian professionals abroad. The MEA operates at the pace of diplomatic notes. The security establishment has no framework for responding at the velocity of swarm networks and primary campaigns. The failure is one of doctrine, of imagination, and of inter-agency synchronisation.
The United States is abandoning the posture of a reliable partner that gave it leverage over allies for seven decades. Europe is de-risking from American security guarantees. Gulf states are diversifying away from dollar-denominated oil settlements. India’s drift is entirely consistent with this global realignment. At the Raisina Dialogue in March 2026, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told his hosts directly that America would not repeat the mistakes it made with China twenty years ago, the implication being that India’s economic ascent required management rather than encouragement. Jaishankar replied the following day: India’s rise would be determined by India itself. Beneath the language of strategic partnership, Washington has begun to view India’s trajectory as a competitive threat. The result, in slow motion, is precisely the more capable and more resentful India that Washington fears.
The timing sharpens the contradiction. Even as Trump signals interest in stabilising relations with China through renewed high-level engagement, his administration is degrading the very social and technological linkages that made India the most strategically viable long-term balancing partner available to the United States. Washington spent two decades describing India as indispensable to the Asian balance of power. It is now weakening that relationship from within.
The US-India relationship has rested, more than either government has publicly acknowledged, on the four million Indian-Americans who gave it its human weight. No government agreement, business arbitrage or defence framework has matched that durability. Diplomacy has no substitute for what people carry across borders when they move. America is dismantling that architecture, and India is quietly acquiring alternative partners: Accelerating the EU relationship, formalising defence ties outside the American framework, internationalising the rupee. The Carnegie Endowment’s 2026 survey found that fourteen percent of Indian Americans—one in seven—have frequently considered leaving the United States. Washington has yet to understand what it is dismantling. By the time it does, the process will be well advanced, moving at a velocity that no tariff rollback or even an empowered ambassador can reverse.
Trust, once spent, does not replenish at the rate it drained.
Brigadier Anil Raman (Retd) is a Research Fellow at the Takshashila Institution and the Head of the Defence Fellowship Program. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)