Abstract
The structures of the tech industry, with its dependence on highly skilled immigrant workers, and the H-1B visa, with its dependence on sponsoring companies, bind tech workers in a cycle of legal violence.
Unless immigrants manage to find another sponsor, they cannot leave their jobs—they depend on their employer to renew their visas, to apply for legal status modifications, and to manage the legal processes related to maintaining their immigration status.
The Preiser Project, Flickr CC
Eduardo and Raj are both computer engineers. They moved to the United States as tech workers on H-1B temporary work visas. Eduardo is from Colombia and Raj from India. Their wives and children joined them on H-4 or dependent visas. These highly skilled workers migrated to be part of what they perceived as a “Tech Paradise.” Despite highly publicized issues of gender discrimination and its economic instability, the IT industry has nonetheless maintained a steady demand for skilled workers (in turn, feeding the perception that it is a lucrative labor sector), as reported by accounting scholar Maryam Farhadi and colleagues in PLoS ONE in 2012.
In fact, policy analysts Robert D. Atkinson and Luke A. Stewart report in an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation brief that, “in 2011, the IT industry contributed about $650 billion to the U.S. economy, or 4.3 percent of GDP, an increase from 3.4 percent of GDP in the early 1990s.”
Highly skilled immigrants are rarely viewed as legally vulnerable or as facing limited social and economic opportunities. Our research on immigrant Indian and Colombian information technology workers, however, reveals a different story. After five years of working in the IT industry, the promise of the so-called tech paradise seems tenuous for both Eduardo and Raj. These highly skilled workers are uncertain and anxious about the stability and prospects of their jobs and immigration statuses because of their temporary work visas.
The legal struggles temporary workers have faced in the United States since the 1990s are worsening under the Trump Administration. Its hardline stance on immigration has raised H-1B visa holders’ sense of precarity. Trump has sent inconsistent signals to these immigrants: on one hand, programs such as “Buy Americans, Hire Americans” seek to shrink the H-1B program, but, on the other, high profile endorsements of merit-based immigration suggest that the skilled H-1B visa holders may be particularly valued among U.S. immigrants.
Highly skilled immigrants are rarely viewed as legally vulnerable or as facing limited social and economic opportunities. Our research on immigrant Indian and Colombian information technology workers reveals a different story.
Our research indicates that the legal stipulations of H-1B visas and the backlogs associated with their legal status adjustment—from H-1B to Legal Permanent Residence (LPR)—are amplifying the vulnerability experienced by workers like Eduardo and Raj. We found that workers experience exploitation, downward economic and occupational mobilities, and workplace marginalization. We also found that the laws associated with these temporary visas negatively affect their spouses and families. In some cases, the stress and panic associated with having only temporary legal status stems from their sense that they could be deported at any time. Further, while the experiences we report among Indian and Colombian tech workers in relation to the immigration legal system are similar, they also differ in important ways.
The Case for Indian and Colombian IT Workers
Historically, India and Colombia have invested in developing their elite tech workers. Over time, these workers have become key figures in the global migration of labor. We interviewed 30 Indian and 31 Colombian tech workers, most of whom were men and came to the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s on H-1B temporary work visas. As some of the pioneer beneficiaries of the H-1B program, IT immigrant workers and their experience with the program encapsulate the damaging long-term effects of being dependent on their employers to maintain their legal status (a legal prerequisite for the issuance of H-1B visas). The lessons we learned from these workers as they transitioned from H-1B status to LPR could potentially extend to other high status occupations, especially now that an array of U.S. visa programs has come under deeper scrutiny.
Legal dependence shapes the daily interactions of immigrant professionals and impacts their incorporation in the United States. The material and emotional repercussions on the lives of Indian and Colombian immigrant professionals illustrate the effects of legal violence.
Indian tech workers are the largest group of H-1B visa holding immigrants in the United States, and most academic and public discourses readily tend to their experiences. Colombia is another country sending many tech workers to the United States, and, like Indians, Colombian IT workers are racial minorities in this country. Yet we rarely have any insight into their migration journeys. Given their shared immigration status but differential LPR processing time, a comparison across these groups highlights similarities and differences in racially minoritized workers’ experiences as temporary immigrants.
The Carrot and the Stick: Legal Dependence
Highly skilled migrants’ H-1B work visas are formally sponsored by specific employers. As a result, these migrants must rely on the good will of their employers, making them susceptible to exploitation. Unless migrants manage to find another sponsor, they cannot leave their jobs—they depend on their employer to renew their visas, to apply for legal status modifications, and to manage the legal processes related to maintaining their immigration status. Our participants could renew their work visas through an application that ensured employer sponsorship. Of our sample group, employers agreed to sponsor the LPR applications of 20 (of 31) Colombian and 25 (of 30) Indian IT workers that we interviewed. The backlogs and unclear stipulations associated with the submission and management of employer-sponsored LPR applications aggravated the relationship of dependence created by the H-1B visa program. Migrants from most countries must anxiously wait as the backlog of status conversion applications is cleared, but Indian (and Chinese) workers wait an unusually long time—between eight and 25 years compared to Colombian workers’ 3 to 6 years. The legal dependence, created by the sponsoring structure of work visas and LPR applications, has both short-term and long-term implications in the lives of migrant professionals, as one of us (Rincón) wrote in Latino Studies in 2017.
Ravish, an Indian tech worker, told Banerjee (one of the authors) that his company had applied for his green card (his LPR), and relayed: “you’d think I am happy because not many companies do this and they don’t do it for all their employees, but I am not. This is a carrot and a stick situation for me. So, if I were really a temporary worker, I would think, after six years I can start over but now I am basically bonded to my employer.”
The “carrot and stick” situation is the central contradiction created by the backlogs and long waits associated with the legal adjustment processes migrant professionals face. Legal dependence makes migrant professionals feel unsettled and anxious. Enrique, a Colombian software engineer, revealed, “I had a really rough time. I used to think, ‘How long can I take this?’ It was difficult not to have control over the situation. I was getting really worried because the economy was bad and I could not change jobs because I needed to wait for the residence with these people [company]. They approved the sponsorship, but I could also see them laying people off, cancelling residence request processes, and I was like, ‘What do I do?’”
Legal dependence feels like helplessness to these sponsored IT immigrant workers. They cannot switch jobs (at least, not without another company willing to sponsor their visas), which enables exploitative behaviors in the workplace as well as economic and professional stagnation. Legal dependence also takes a toll on immigrants’ self-esteem, deeply affecting their personal and family lives as they settle in a new country.
For guest tech workers, the visa system feels like a stifling, stressful labyrinth of laws and dependencies.
Dirk van den Brink, Flickr CC
Legal Violence: Equal but Different
Legal dependence shapes the daily interactions of immigrant professionals and impacts their incorporation in the United States. We argue that the material and emotional repercussions of the legal process on the lives of Indian and Colombian immigrant professionals illustrate the effects of legal violence. Sociologists Cecilia Menjívar and L. J. Abrego define legal violence in their 2012 American Journal of Sociology article as “the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law that obstruct and derail immigrants’ paths of incorporation.” These effects can harm immigrants’ ability to move up the economic and occupational ladder and delay life course expectations.
Racial marginalization and labeling aggravate the effects of legal violence on the lives of immigrant IT workers. In our study, the contrasting American perceptions of Indian and Colombian immigrants resulted in slight differences in the ways each group experienced migration. Indian IT workers, like Sambit, characterized their long-term legal dependence and racialized marginalization as indentured servitude. Sambit shared, “I feel like a glorified servant, I have so little power to change my situation… We Indian IT folks usually have 12-hour workdays— 8 a.m to 8 p.m. Our American bosses go home by 4 p.m., and really we are supposed to only work til 5 p.m., but I know of three people in my company whose contracts were terminated on two days’ notice and they and their family had to go back to India within the week.” Sambit’s employment “situation” fits neatly with the work lives recounted by Indian workers in several industries. In Banerjee’s dissertation research she demonstrated that the liminal, or in-between, legal status of workers caught between temporary visas and LPRs, led Indian immigrant workers to feel obliged to work long, hard hours to avoid risking their legal status.
Conversely, most Colombian immigrant professionals reported that they often managed to “pass as White,” and so their fear of deportation was tied more explicitly to their accents and ethnic names on their official documents. Gabriel, a software engineer, recounted a tense interaction during a traffic stop: “I was stopped because I was going too fast. I didn’t have my passport with the visa in it, I only had my license. They took me to the police station in Rochester [New York] and called the immigration police. I had to wait there, because they were coming from Buffalo. I told them I had a work visa and explained that I worked in a small start-up company, but they did not want to hear about it. After a while, they… found out that I was here legally.” Gabriel remembered “it was sad” that the group of police officers “was two Latinos and a White man,” adding, “This really made me realize that in any moment or with a misunderstanding I could be deported.”
Race and legal status have interlocking effects, both inside and outside the workplace. Although we did not learn of any deportation cases among our respondents, Gabriel’s experience suggests Latinxs might be subject to criminalization due to the assumption of “illegality” attached to their race and ethnicity, as Tanya Golash-Boza and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo suggest in their 2013 Latino Studies article. In both cases, negative racialization intersects with assumptions about workers’ legal statuses.
In day-to-day workplace situations, co-workers often referred to temporary workers as financial burdens to their companies because of the costs associated with maintaining their legal status. Their comments stigmatized and marginalized these immigrants even in their employer-sponsored jobs. Indian workers, for example, reported being relegated to segregated workspaces where they only interacted with other Indian workers. “We see the Americans once a week for team meeting or when the boss comes to our floor to talk to us,” Satya said. And Colombian workers were kept from participating in specific projects because their tenure was perceived as only short-term. In this way, legal status became a defining, distancing marker separating immigrant workers from their co-workers.
Like other immigrant workers in other fields of work, our participants felt they were paid less than White Americans for doing the same job. Federico, a Colombian worker, witnessed salary disparities over time. “When I began to be a ‘normal’ employee, so to speak, they gave me a raise. Before that I depended on them [my employers] to keep my H-1B and to move the green card process forward. They knew it, they knew I depended on them and they took advantage of that circumstance.”
Aniket, an Indian worker, was shocked to find out that his American counterpart made $20,000 more for the same work. “We are bodyshopped items,” he said, employing a racialized term used to describe Indian IT firms’ mass exporting of backend professionals to western countries, “and so we are worth less, though we write better and more efficient codes.”
The structure of the IT industry, with its dependence on immigrant workers, and the visa structure, with its dependence on sponsoring companies, facilitates and sustains the legal violence manifesting in the discriminatory pay and constrained occupational mobility experienced by workers.
The structure of the IT industry, with its dependence on immigrant workers, and the visa structure, with its dependence on sponsoring companies, facilitates and sustains the legal violence manifesting in the discriminatory pay and constrained occupational mobility experienced by tech workers.
Familial Dependence
The legal barriers produced by immigration laws create ruptures within immigrant families, as the legal dependence experienced by our interviewees seeps into their home lives. Dependent family members (spouses and children) of H-1B visa holders have H-4 or dependent visas, and they are not allowed to work legally work until the H-1B holder in their family has cleared the first step of the LPR approval process. As noted above, this process can take years—as many as 25 years, for Indian immigrants.
Most of the dependent spouses of the IT workers in our studies were highly educated and had professional careers premigration. The stipulations of their H-4 visas, particularly the prohibition on working for pay, often creates a gendered arrangement in which the primarily male H-1B visa holders are sole breadwinners and their female spouses are forced to “stay home.” This arrangement causes deep strains and unhappiness. The wives of IT workers despised their dependent status, telling us it crushed their pre-migration independent professional identities. In our interviews with Indian women, many called the dependent visas “prison visas,” and many of their husbands felt guilty for putting their wives in that unfair situation. They lamented over their wives’ dependent status and how the pressures of their jobs, especially the sense that they needed to work harder and longer hours than others, ate into the time they would otherwise have for their families.
Much like the Indian men, the Colombian IT workers felt guilty about inadvertently relegating their highly qualified wives to housewifery. But many did not know what the H-4 visa meant pre-migration. Boris, a Colombian IT worker, said, “So, one of the challenges was that my wife and I, we didn’t know that she couldn’t work. In the letter it says you have an H-1B visa, your wife has an H-4. It doesn’t say persons with H-4 cannot work. When we arrived to Arizona, we were really happy until we found out that she can’t work. My wife abandoned her career. That devastated her… it is frustrating: a highly educated person, a person who worked hard and then everything was blocked for her. That sucks.”
The spousal dependent visas amplified how beholden workers felt to employers: firms paid for the visa and transit of their families. It also made tech workers’ hours seem extendable, as companies were aware these employees had a non-working spouse at home. Immigrant workers were frequently called in after hours and on holidays to fill in for American workers. One Indian IT worker noted, “when my White boss’s dog gets sick, he takes off at midday, but I can’t leave work even when my child is sick. They know I have a wife at home.” Many Indian IT workers saw themselves as “absentee fathers,” and their wives agreed, describing themselves as “single mothers” because of enforced gendered divisions of household labor and carework. Beyond the emotional toll, the centrality of legal dependence in the lives of the IT workers becomes more pronounced, as these single-earner families also struggle financially.
Indian IT workers noted, too, that their American coworkers’ ignorance about immigration laws led to inadvertent prejudice. The common perception among American workers was that the guest workers did not allow their “obedient wives” to work because of the “backward patriarchal culture of India.” Many of our respondents found such sentiments amusing, but their wives patently did not. They did not want to be stereotyped as victims of “foreign” patriarchy.
The Trumpian Future
We have shown that high-skilled immigrants of color do not receive a red-carpet welcome when they come to the United States. Instead, they face precarity, legal violence, stereotyping, exploitation, and long, anxious waits. This situation is likely to worsen under the Trump Administration.
In the first half of his first term, Donald Trump has, in words and actions, attempted to alter the futures of immigrants in America, including the IT workers we interviewed. In February 2017, soon after President Trump’s first “Muslim ban,” online news outlet Vox leaked an unsigned Executive Order designed to restructure high-skilled migration to the United States and clamp down on the H-1B visa program. While there has been no movement on this EO, the Trump Administration has been threatening every few months to sign the proposed regulation. As of February 2019, the proposed regulation has been submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for consideration. If passed, the regulation would rescind President Obama’s rulings allowing spouses of H-1B workers to obtain work permits and add surveillance to the program.
Trump has also initiated programs like “Buy American, Hire American,” which empowers the Department of Homeland Security to exercise further scrutiny in H-1B visa processing for workers and employers. This has meant the suspension of provisions for new high-skilled workers to bring their families to the United States. Other legal actions, like unannounced, random checks vetting immigrant workers in IT firms, unfair detentions, deportation proceedings, and family separations have become regular occurrences as well. Trump has suggested the expansion of the merit-based immigration program—effectively, the H-1B visa program—but that is no comfort when it is treated as a zero-sum game in which other immigration programs, like refugee and resettlement programs, will be slashed.
Perhaps most galling, the inconsistency of Trump’s proposals and programs has amplified the already prevalent panic felt by the main beneficiaries of the H-1B visa program, immigrant IT workers. Particularly among the Indian tech workers and wives we spoke with, there were deep concerns and fear about their futures that had gotten worse in follow-up interviews after Trump’s election. One wife relayed, “I have lost sleep since Trump came to power. We are constantly afraid that we’ll be asked to leave, anytime.” Another woman told us that Trump’s election “has completely rattled us—meaning the entire community. We feel very uncertain about our fate in the U.S. We are considering returning to India. We can’t live in fear all the time.”
The realities of downward mobility, fear of deportation, family separation, marital strife, long-term anxiety, and depression are among the most concerning outcomes that these workers are facing due to their legal status as temporary workers. In fact, we believe the downward economic path and the mental health challenges accruing from the backlogs and complicated stipulations of the law obstruct the benefits that these workers’ education and professional experience may otherwise have granted them.
Trump’s America seems designed to strip away the defenses of the already marginalized. Among highly educated immigrants, the United States no longer bears any resemblance to the “tech paradise” that might once have enticed them to bring their skills and expertise to our shores.