Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is visiting President Trump at the White House on Thursday, will need to perform a delicate ‘Garba dance’ on immigration to placate numerous interests.
Modi’s visit to Washington comes at a crucial moment as India scrambles to avert a potential trade showdown with the U.S. by offering swift concessions on tariffs and immigration. With bilateral trade surpassing $118 billion in 2024 and India’s trade surplus hitting $36.8 billion, Trump’s long-standing criticism of India as a “tariff king” looms large over the talks. Modi has cut import duties on key American exports—including motorcycles, satellite equipment, and industrial components—and pledged to accept the deportation of 18,000 undocumented Indian migrants in a bid to align with Trump’s hardline immigration stance. As the two leaders meet, the stakes are high for India’s economic strategy, U.S.-India trade ties, and Modi’s ability to maintain favorable access to the American market.
Modi is from the Indian state of Gujarat, and Gujaratis form a significant proportion of the Indian diaspora in the United States. The famous Gujarati dance, Garba, involves dancers moving in circles around a central lamp or an image of the goddess Shakti, the Hindu embodiment of power and divine energy, accompanied by songs in praise of the feminine force, rhythmic clapping, and intricate footwork. Trump, the uber-Mensch, could well be Shakti.
Immigration is a significant issue to India and Indians, far more critical than it is to Trump's MAGA base. In truth, Trump’s America First movement has taken a hardline stance on both legal and illegal immigration, redefining the term to align with its vision of protecting American jobs. There is sufficient evidence that aggressive tactics by Indian IT companies have displaced sizable numbers of American techies. American companies outsource work to India or hire Indians on H-1B visas for jobs in America.
To understand the scale of India's dominance in IT services, consider that in the early 2000s, the Indian IT-BPM (Information Technology—Business Process Management) industry posted annual revenues of about $13 billion. In 2023-24, these numbers were $253.9 billion, a nearly 20-fold increase. Much of this growth was facilitated by the use of H-1B temporary on-site resources, and almost all of India's growth came from Western countries, primarily the United States.
When outsourcing occurs, American workers are often expected to train their incoming H-1B counterparts in return for severance pay bound by nondisclosure language. This travesty led to a public furor in 2014-15 when Walt Disney Parks and Resorts laid off approximately 250 IT workers from its technology operations in Florida. Laid-off Disney employees were required to train their replacements, who were H-1B visa holders from HCL Technologies and Cognizant Technology Solutions, to retain severance benefits and bonuses. The work was farmed over time to Indian employees in India.
Foreign IT professionals, primarily Indians, arrive in America on a list of alphabet-soup of visas and rarely leave. This demographic is law-abiding, pays taxes, and pays attention to complicated rules regarding visa qualifications, stays, and extensions. The grassroots MAGA base sees them as part of the broader outsourcing problem affecting American jobs.
While the H-1B visa has been a major point of debate recently, other visas are just as generous, if not more. The L-1 Visa for intracompany transferees, such as when IBM India transfers a senior engineer to IBM Armonk, is valid for up to 7 years and is not subject to an annual cap. The O-1 Visa for individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement in sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics also does not have a yearly cap. The H-4 visa, given to spouses of H-1B visa holders, also has no annual cap, nor does it restrict employment through labor condition agreements. Finally, the F-1 Visa with OPT (Optional Practical Training) allows students to work in their field of study after or during their academic program. Post-completion OPT can last 12 months, with STEM students eligible for a 24-month extension.
Indians dominate every visa category above, and the Modi government wants it to stay that way. On January 26, the New York Times reported that Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesman for India's Foreign Ministry, said: "We have been engaging with U.S. authorities on curbing illegal immigration, with the view of creating more avenues for legal migration from India to the U.S."
But diaspora Indians on these visas are an upset bunch. Because the number of Green Cards is legally capped for each country, the number of Indians waiting to convert their work visas to Green Cards has increased. Experts predict that for those entering the queue now, it could take nearly 100 years to receive their green cards.
To get a sense of the tension, one only has to visit X, formerly Twitter. Indians argue for changes to immigration laws to help more legal, tax-paying workers get their green cards so that they can settle down in the U.S. Trump’s nationalist base, influenced by figures like Stephen Bannon, has called for a moratorium on legal migration and the removal of H-1B visa holders, arguing that American companies exploit the visa system to undercut U.S. workers. Speaking on the floor of the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders, an unlikely accomplice of grassroots MAGA, highlighted that in 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using the H-1B program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while hiring over 34,000 H-1B workers. He specifically mentioned companies like Tesla employing H-1B workers in roles like accountants and engineers at salaries he considered too low for the claimed skill level.
What complicates matters is that the MAGA leadership—Trump, Elon Musk, and several close business associates of Trump—is in favor of increasing legal migration, aligning with official Indian policy. The goal of the Indian Center of Migration, set up in 2008 under India's Ministry of External Affairs, is to "develop and sustain a national strategy to be globally competitive as a labor supplier." The Ministry is pleased with Trump, who, in recent weeks, has openly embraced legal immigration with statements such as: "We want to have as many people come in as possible, but they have to come in legally," or, "We want people to come in. We need people. We need a lot of people. We want them," or "I'm fine with legal immigration. I like it. We need people, and I'm absolutely fine with it. We need it because we are going to have a lot of companies coming in to avoid tariffs."
But Trump can ill-afford to lose his MAGA base in the upcoming 2026 midterms. The House today has a 1-seat GOP majority, so fragile that a single dissenting vote can kill a bill that Trump wants the Senate to pass so that he can sign it into law.
If Trump moves to fully appease his base, it will test Modi’s dancing skills like never before. The Indian diaspora and future Indian migrants to America are counting on his friendship with Trump to work a miracle.
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