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Days Before PM Modi's Visit, US Eases Green Card Eligibility Norms

A Green Card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently.

The US has eased norms on the eligibility criteria for those waiting for green cards.

The Biden administration has eased norms by releasing policy guidance on the eligibility criteria for those waiting for green cards to work and stay in America, days ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the US from June 21-24 at the invitation of US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. They will host PM Modi at a state dinner on June 22.

The visit also includes an address to the Joint Session of the Congress on June 22.

The guidance issued by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) regarding the eligibility criteria for initial and renewal applications for Employment Authorisation Document (EAD) in compelling circumstances is expected to help thousands of Indian technology professionals who are in the agonisingly long wait for a Green Card or permanent residency.

Immigration law provides for approximately 140,000 employment-based green cards to be issued each year.

However, only seven per cent of those green cards can go to individuals from a single country annually.

The USCIS guidance outlines specific requirements that applicants must meet to be eligible for an initial EAD based on compelling circumstances.

These include being the principal beneficiary of an approved Form I-140, being in valid non-immigrant status or authorised grace period, not having filed an adjustment of status application, and meeting certain biometrics and criminal background requirements.

Further, USCIS will exercise discretion to determine whether an applicant demonstrates compelling circumstances justifying the issuance of employment authorisation.

"These measures are a significant step towards supporting individuals facing challenging situations and ensuring their ability to work lawfully in the United States," said Ajay Bhutoria, a prominent community leader and advocate for immigrant rights.

He highlighted the importance of these measures for individuals and their dependents who find themselves in challenging situations such as serious illness or disability, employer disputes or retaliation, significant harm, or disruptions to employment.

Mr Bhutoria said the non-exhaustive list of qualifying circumstances, as provided by USCIS, offers individuals an opportunity to present evidence supporting their case.

"For instance, individuals with approved immigrant visa petitions in oversubscribed categories or chargeability areas may submit evidence like school or higher education enrollment records, mortgage records, or long-term lease records to demonstrate compelling circumstances," he said.

This provision can prove crucial in situations where families face the potential loss of their home, withdrawal of children from school, or the need to relocate to their home country due to job loss, Mr Bhutoria added.

Foundation of India and Indian Diaspora Studies (FIIDS), which has been advocating for laid-off H1-B workers, applauded USCIS for taking such a step that would help a large number of Indian IT professionals.

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"I really feel proud that a sustained advocacy for more than six months started reflecting in considerations and adjustments by USCIS," said Khanderao Kand from FIIDS.  

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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US to Ease H-1B Visa Rules for Skilled Indian Workers as PM Modi Visits. Check Details

Curated By : Majid Alam

Last Updated: June 22, 2023, 07:50 IST

Washington D.C., United States of America (USA)

Indian applicants dominated H-1B visa approvals, obtaining 72.6% of the total visas allocated in FY2022. (Image: Shutterstock)

Indian nationals are by far the most active users of the US H-1B program and made up 73 percent of the nearly 442,000 H-1B workers in fiscal year 2022

At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on the state visit to the United States, the Joe Biden administration is expected to make it easier for Indians to live and work in the United States.

The US State Department is expected to announce that a small number of Indians and other foreign workers on H-1B visas will be able to renew those visas in the US, without having to travel abroad, Reuters quoted sources as saying.

The move is part of a pilot program that could be expanded in coming years to help some skilled workers enter or remain in the country.

Indian nationals are by far the most active users of the US H-1B program and made up 73 percent of the nearly 442,000 H-1B workers in fiscal year 2022.

“We all recognize that mobility of our people is a huge asset to us,” said another US official. “And so our goal is to approach that in a sort of multifaceted way. The State Department already has been working very hard to find creative ways to make changes to things.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on questions about which visa types would qualify or the timing of the pilot launch.

“The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to two years,” the spokesperson said, while declining to define small.

The steps could change and are not finalized until they are announced. The White House declined to comment.

The US government makes 65,000 H-1B visas available to companies seeking skilled foreign workers, along with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees each year. The visas last for three years and can be renewed for another three years.

The companies using the most H-1B workers in recent years include the Indian-based Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services as well as Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in the US, according to U.S. government data.

The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to renew visas in the US would free up resources for visa interviews in consulates abroad, the spokesperson said.

The pilot program would also include some workers with L-1 visas, which are available to people transferring within a company to a position in the U.S., one of the sources said.

A separate initiative to clear a backlog of visa applications at US embassies in India is finally showing signs of progress and is expected to be figure into the discussions between the two countries’ delegations in Washington this week.

India has long had concerns with the difficulty its citizens face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including technology industry workers. More than 10 million jobs stood open in the United States at the end of April, according to the Labor Department.

The Biden administration has spent months working to improve visa access for Indians, trying to get around the lack of political will in Congress to comprehensively reform US immigration policy. President Joe Biden wants to knit together the world’s two largest democracies, partly in a bid to better compete with China.

(With inputs from Reuters)

• Narendra Modi
• narendra modi in us

What’s behind Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s US visit?

The US is seeking stronger ties with India, which it sees as a vital ally in efforts to contain China’s rise.

The administration of United States President Joe Biden is scheduled to host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an official visit later this week, as the two countries strengthen their ties amid shared antipathy towards China’s growing influence.

The White House will hold a state dinner in Modi’s honour on June 22, a sign of the burgeoning relationship between the two powers who have stepped up cooperation in areas such as trade and arms sales.

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India, us agree on roadmap for defence industry cooperation, india’s pm narendra modi to address us congress, bbc gets india court summons in defamation case over modi film.

In a press release, the Biden administration said that a recent trip to New Delhi by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan “underscored the dynamism of the US-India partnership in advance of Prime Minister Modi’s historic official state visit next week to the United States”.

But human rights groups say the celebratory dinner is a de facto endorsement of India’s far-right turn under Modi’s leadership — and undermines the Biden administration’s stated goal of emphasising human rights and democracy in its foreign policy.

During Modi’s tenure, India’s Muslims and other minorities have experienced an uptick in violence and repression as the government leans into a form of Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva . Modi has also been criticised for seeking to consolidate power and crack down on dissent.

“A state dinner is a special occasion; it’s not something that just any foreign leader receives,” Edward Mitchell, the deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera over a phone call.

“How can the White House honour a leader who is an open anti-Muslim bigot, a right-wing ideologue who censors journalists and turns a blind eye to lynchings? You can work with India and Modi without taking this extra step to celebrate him.”

Confronting China

While advocacy groups have called for greater scrutiny of India’s human rights record , foreign policy experts say the Biden administration is primarily interested in the country as a potential counterweight to China, which the US sees as its most formidable global competitor.

Sarang Shidore, Director of Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute, a US-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that he believes the US-India relationship will continue to grow as long as their shared concern over China remains in place.

“The United States does not conduct its foreign policy based on democracy and human rights. It conducts its foreign policy based on its interests, as all states do,” Shidore said.

China’s growing military power and assertive territorial claims have become a source of concern for nearby Asian countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and India. The US has worked to fashion alliances with many of those countries in an attempt to contain China’s expanding influence.

“No question, there is increased Chinese nationalism,” said Shidore. “And China sees India as an increasing challenge due to its relationship with the US.”

Expanding ties

That was not always the case. During the Cold War, India’s relations with the US were often frosty. The country had cultivated close ties with the USSR and helped spearhead the Non-Aligned Movement, an organisation of countries that rejected pressures to join either pro-US or pro-Soviet blocs.

For its part, the US was a key ally of Pakistan. And by the early 1970s, the administration of US President Richard Nixon started to build a cooperative relationship with China, as an attempt, in part, to place pressure on the USSR.

But as the Cold War ended and China’s economic rise became a preoccupation of US foreign policy, India — with its size and economic heft — started to be seen as a key regional ally.

Despite its improved ties with the US, however, India has continued to resist what it sees as a false choice between the US and countries like President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

But as Russia wages war in Ukraine and Washington seeks to isolate Moscow economically and diplomatically, that balancing act has become more difficult for India to maintain.

While India has increased its purchase of weapons from countries such as France and the US and recently agreed on a roadmap to increase cooperation with the US defence industry, it remains the world’s largest importer of Russian arms.

India has also joined China in buying up Russian oil at discounted prices, while the US and the European Union angle to limit Russia’s power in the global energy market.

But Shidore said that India’s status as a central player in Washington’s Asia strategy gives it significant leverage . Its ties to Russia are not likely to get in the way of its relationship with the US, he explained.

“India has played this quite well, playing Russia and the US off each other, and has benefitted in the process,” he said. “A country like India, which has such a strong convergence with the US on China, can create major spaces where it will differ very strongly from the US and can ride that out.”

Consolidating control

While US relations with allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel have come under political scrutiny in recent years, Modi’s trip to the US has been welcomed with bipartisan support. An a joint letter inviting Modi to address Congress during his visit, members of the US House of Representatives and Senate have hailed the visit as a sign of the “enduring friendship” between the two countries.

“During your address, you will have the opportunity to share your vision for India’s future and speak to the global challenges our countries both face,” the letter reads.

However, Modi’s human rights record has not gone entirely unremarked. On Tuesday, a group of more than 70 lawmakers from the US House and Senate penned a letter to the Biden urging him to discuss concerns about religious freedom and journalistic expression in his talks with Modi.

The Muslim rights group CAIR, meanwhile, has issued a statement calling on the White House to drop its plans for a state dinner.

Modi’s high-profile reception in the US is a far cry from what he experienced before he was first elected prime minister in 2014. Prior to becoming India’s leader, Modi had been banned from entering the US due to allegations that he turned a blind eye to anti-Muslim violence in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, when he was the province’s chief minister.

The deadly 2002 riots were the subject of a BBC documentary that Modi tried to ban in January, invoking his emergency powers as prime minister. The rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch screened the documentary in Washington on Tuesday.

Human rights groups say the move to ban the film was representative of a larger effort under Modi to stifle dissent and exercise control over independent institutions. They also accuse his government of pursuing an agenda influenced by far-right Hindu nationalism.

In an annual report on religious freedom in May, the US State Department expressed concern about the situation in India, noting that there were “open calls for genocide against Muslims”, lynchings and “attacks on places of worship”.

In May, for the fourth year in a row, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom called on the State Department to designate India as a “country of particular concern”.

In some states controlled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), politicians who lean into violent anti-Muslim rhetoric face little reprimand. Some Hindu nationalist paramilitaries have also waged a campaign against interfaith marriages , which they portray as an effort to dilute the Hindu population and win converts to Islam through “love jihad”.

Shidore, however, said that Modi’s human rights record has been quickly “papered over” and is unlikely to prevent cooperation with the US, so long as China remains a serious global competitor.

“The United States”, he said, “has set human rights issues aside in order to strengthen ties”.

What Modi’s Visit to Washington Tells Us About Indian American Voters

N arendra Modi was once shunned by the U.S. In 2005, the then-chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat was denied a diplomatic visa amid accusations he tacitly supported Hindu mobs during communal violence three years earlier that left more than a thousand people, most of them Muslim, dead.

But he is shunned no more. On June 22, Washington will roll out the red carpet for Modi, who will become just the third world leader (after France’s Emmanuel Macron and South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol) to be invited by President Joe Biden for a state visit and dinner, the highest of diplomatic receptions typically reserved for only the closest of allies. That Biden has chosen to fete Modi in this way is indicative of the “deep and close partnership” between their two countries, the White House said in a statement , especially on matters of foreign policy. But it is perhaps also emblematic of the growing visibility and electoral heft of the Indian American community.

“Indian Americans are a key constituency and a key vote in a number of swing states,” says Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College and a senior researcher at AAPI Data, which publishes demographic data and policy research on Asian Americans.

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With a population of nearly 5 million, Indian Americans are the second-largest immigrant group and fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S. today. Their impact is evident at the ballot box, where Indian Americans voted in record numbers during the 2020 presidential election. It is also becoming increasingly apparent in the halls of power, from Congress (where there are five Indian American lawmakers currently serving, up from just one a decade ago) to the White House (where Kamala Harris, who is biracial, made history as the first Vice President of Indian heritage). While every presidential contest since 2016 has featured at least one Indian American candidate, 2024 is poised to be the first race to feature at least two: Nikki Hayley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose parents hail from Kerala.

Modi’s enduring popularity among the diaspora

The Indian American community’s political weight has not been lost on Modi, who has leveraged its influence time and again. When the Prime Minister first came to power in 2014, he was received by 20,000 spectators at a sold-out event in New York’s Madison Square Garden during a five-day visit to the U.S. It was the largest reception any foreign leader has received in the country after the Pope. “This is India’s century,” Modi declared, sending the wildly enthusiastic crowd into a frenzy.

In 2019, Modi once again received a jubilant reception with nearly 50,000 spectators at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Houston.

A survey on Indian American attitudes conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and YouGov in 2020 found that Indian Americans held broadly favorable views of Modi, with nearly half approving of his performance as Prime Minister. Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at Carnegie, says that this might be because the Indian diaspora sees Modi as “reclaiming India’s rightful status on the global scene.”

“India is now perceived to be both big and vital to geopolitics,” Vaishnav adds. Whether it’s hosting the G-20, being feted at the state dinner by President Biden, or even maintaining cordial relations with Vladimir Putin, he says that “many Indian diaspora members view this as a sign that India is back and experiencing a period of resurgence.”

The support for Modi comes despite the fact that while Indian Americans are hardly a monolith, they tend to vote for Democrats, rather than Republicans who more closely align with Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. As many as 74% of Indian American voters are thought to have backed Biden in 2020, according to a 2022 survey by AAPI Data , compared to just 15% supporting Donald Trump.

While Biden’s welcoming of Modi is widely seen in the context of Washington hoping to strike defense deals with New Delhi (most analysts tell TIME the reason for the visit can be distilled to one word—China—owing to the indispensable role of India in U.S. efforts to deter Chinese aggression), it’s also recognizing Modi’s popularity among a key American voting bloc. “In a time when the country has elections decided by four states and a margin of a few percent or less, every community really matters,” says Neil Makhija, the president of Indian American Impact advocacy group. “Ours really showed up in a significant way for [Biden] in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Arizona.”

Still, the Republican Party sees Indian Americans as a “natural constituency,” Vaishnav says. “They are well-off, and they’re business oriented. They care about low taxes, low regulation, and entrepreneurship, and they’re socially conservative. So I don’t think it’s a group that the Democratic Party is going to take for granted.”

A “very awkward” dilemma

Modi’s state visit also poses a strategic challenge to Biden. As a candidate, the U.S. President made defending human rights and democracy a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda. Critics argue that his embrace of Modi, who over his two terms as Prime Minister has overseen significant democratic backsliding in India, is doing just the opposite.

The controversial Indian leader—who is poised to win his third term next year—has been accused of aggressively championing a Hindu-nationalist agenda that critics say reinvents the very idea of India as a pluralist, secular democracy to a religious, nationalist autocracy. Under Modi’s leadership, India has passed discriminatory laws that have alienated nearly 200 million Muslims; squashed dissent by jailing journalists, activists, and civil society organizations; and exercised judicial influence against his political opponents (notably, Rahul Gandhi , the de facto leader and scion of the Gandhi-Nehru family at the helm of the opposition Congress Party).

The U.S. has taken note. The State Department’s annual Religious Freedom Report, a survey of religious freedoms around the world, has expressed a number of concerns over India in recent years. It was notable that unlike last year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made no mention of India in his speech this year, which analysts saw as a move to keep U.S.-India relations friendly ahead of Modi’s visit.

But according to Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University and a vocal critic of Modi’s Hindu nationalist base, the decision to host Modi shows that the “Biden administration does not care about human rights in India. If they did, there is absolutely no way that they would be hosting Modi right now.”

“It’s very awkward for the administration,” adds Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center think-tank in Washington, D.C. “The strategic imperatives of partnership limit the options for the administration to bring attention to this issue—especially publicly, given that this Indian government does not take kindly to any type of external criticism of its internal policies.” The top priority for the administration, he says, will be to “avoid any drama.”

While the White House may want to keep the visit as anodyne as possible, the same doesn’t appear to be the case for the Indian American community at large. In the run up to Modi’s visit, pro-Modi groups have organized “Unity” marches in nearly 20 American cities on June 18, while those opposed to Modi’s presence plan to stage a rally near the White House to coincide with his arrival on June 22.

In an open letter drafted by Hindus for Human Rights, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, several Indian Americans, human rights advocates, and concerned allies have also urged Biden to “push back” against the Indian government’s “escalating attacks on human rights and democracy.”

By honoring Modi, Truschke warns that the White House could inadvertently encourage communal violence within the Indian American community. “This will make Hindu nationalist groups feel even more emboldened in the U.S.,” says Truschke, who herself has been on the receiving end of threats from far-right Hindu nationalists.

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A look at India-US relations as Prime Minister Modi visits the White House

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Tanvi madan and tanvi madan senior fellow - foreign policy , center for asia policy studies @tanvi_madan david dollar david dollar senior fellow - foreign policy , global economy and development , john l. thornton china center.

June 20, 2023

• 26 min read

In the week of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s State Visit to the U.S., Tanvi Madan, senior fellow in Foreign Policy and director of the India Project at Brookings, discusses the state of U.S.-India relations, a strategic technology partnership between the two countries, and how global issues like the Russia-Ukraine war and China factor into the relationship. Madan also looks ahead to India’s objectives when it hosts the next G-20 Summit in September.

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DOLLAR: Hi, I’m David Dollar, host of the Brookings trade podcast Dollar and Sense . Today we’re going to talk about India and Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to the United States. My guest is Tanvi Madan, senior fellow and director of the India Project at Brookings. So, welcome to the show, Tanvi.

MADAN: Thanks, David. It’s good to be on the podcast.

DOLLAR: So, let’s start with the state visit for Prime Minister Modi. What does this mean for him? What is he trying to achieve in this visit?

MADAN: I think there are few different objectives for Prime Minister Modi. For one, it is really to both a reflection of the state of the U.S.-India relationship, which is really burdened under Prime Minister Modi. It’s not that he’s a major departure from his predecessors for the last 20 years, 20 or 25 years, you’ve seen Indian governments deepen ties with the U.S. across the board. But you have seen an uptick across pretty much every domain during the course of the Modi government, which came into power in 2014. And so, I think in some part it’s a reflection for him, and of the Biden administration, to kind of recognize the role he himself has played in deepening these ties.

For Prime Minister Modi, this is an opportunity to really consolidate ties with the country that he has previously in the U.S. called indispensable to India’s transformation. A former Indian national security advisor in the previous government, our former colleague at Brookings, who was at Brookings India, Shivshankar Menon, had said that the U.S. is the one country that is really critical for pretty much every aspect of Indian growth, for security, for technology. And Prime Minister Modi’s policies have reflected that. So, it’s a really kind of a consolidation of those ties. It’s served, this visit is serving as a bit of an action forcing event to get some major deals through. We’ve already heard some news on that.

And then finally, for Prime Minister Modi, it’s also in some ways a political message. There’ll be some political messaging involved. Part of the case he has made to the Indian public is that he is promised to make India respected on the world stage. Now, some will say that India was respected on the world stage before, but an Indian audience has bought this idea and there is this sense, and you hear this from commentators who go to India, come back to talk about the optimism there. And part of it is the story of a kind of being, as they put it, aspiring to be a leading power on the world stage. And so, I think this visit will be seen in that context.

And there’s an election due in 2024, and Prime Minister Modi, I think, will also kind of highlight this visit perhaps in his election campaign.

DOLLAR: That’s an interesting theme that we can carry through to other parts of the interview, that the United States can be useful to India in meeting various objectives. And one of those important objectives is raising the technological level of the economy and of the whole society. And I see that as the U.S. and India have deepened their relations, they’ve announced a strategic partnership on critical and emerging technologies. So, that sounds great. But what substance is there? What does that really mean?

MADAN: They’ve even come up with an acronym, ICET. So, you know when there’s an acronym, it’s probably going to stick around a bit. What this is, is it’s not one kind of big deal, one major deal in its own right. What it is, it’s a framework, it’s a mechanism, it’s really a mechanism to build a strategic trade and technology partnership between the two countries. Not that one didn’t exist, but there was this sense that, you know, there are a lot of these issues that cross the defense, technology, economic domains, innovation domains, and these were interagency by nature, and that you really did need kind of a vehicle to both focus on and try to push some of these things through.

So, what you’ve seen is this was something that was discussed last year by the prime minister and President Biden. And earlier this year, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval launched this. And national Security Advisor Sullivan was just in India for the next stage of this. And the idea behind this is really to focus on a few different domains: is to deepen cooperation in the defense industrial space and the innovation space as well; to try to work on semiconductor supply chains as both countries try to diversify. There’s also a different kind of dialogs and movement in space on the commercial side. Innovation across the board, particularly nurturing talent and developing an innovation bridge between the two countries, developing more secure telecommunications network, as well alternatives.

Now, some of this is being done bilaterally. Some of this is also coming under coming under the Quad, which is the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. grouping, which has its own critical and emerging technologies dialogues. But really what this is, is to try to get some of these initiatives to move forward. So, they’re just taking these, say like the defense industrial cooperation side, drilling down on one or two deals and actually trying to push them through. So, the one that they’re focused on right now is for GE to potentially produce its 414 jet engine in India, co-produce it there, for the indigenously-developed Indian fighter aircraft, so, combat aircraft. So, that’s the kind of thing that they’re trying to trying to develop.

And the people like buzz words. And so I think the buzzwords around these are things like “security and resilience,” “technology and talent.” And so you’ve seen this is really a almost kind of, you know, like people say an action forcing an event. This is kind of an initiative that is a forcing initiative. What is interesting about it is this is perhaps the first dialogue I can think of that is led by the National Security Councils in both countries. There are other dialogs that have come out of it, including a very new, just met a couple of weeks ago, the strategic trade dialogue, which is basically to drill down and identify obstacles and overcome them in terms of export controls and those kind of issues.

So, you’re seeing a lot of things coming out of it. But I think this is one of these initiatives where we won’t know for another ten years if it was really successful or not. We’ll see some announcements when Prime Minister Modi is here coming out of it. But I think the true nature of it, because if it works, it would be a generational investment in the relationship and particularly the innovation side of it.

DOLLAR: For this kind of technological cooperation between India and the United States, it seems to me that having this large Indian diaspora in the U.S. has to be an advantage. So, I assume they’re pretty happy with the way relations are developing between the U.S. and India. Do they have any specific concerns?

MADAN: It is very much at the core, in fact, in some ways of ICET itself. But even on the societal, the people-to-people dimension side, when cabinet officials, cabinet ministers on both sides talk about this relationship, especially on the U.S. side, you’ve heard them bringing up the people-to-people dimension a lot more. There’s now a diaspora of over 4 million, and it’s still quite small compared to other immigrant groups. But nonetheless, particularly … and I was just running the numbers and you’ve seen 76% … there are almost 200,000 Indian students now in the U.S., and 76% of them are in STEM fields. The innovation side of that ICET that really is very much. And so it’s forming this natural bridge that even if people return, or, it’s connecting the two industries.

I think the diaspora is quite supportive of and likes that U.S.-India ties have developed. One trend that we we’ve seen kind of in recent years is not fissures in the diaspora, but you’re really seeing the diversity of the diaspora where our colleagues at Carnegie next door have done a study on Indian Americans and how they vote, and they tend to kind of vote on issues that matter to them, not necessarily on U.S.-India relations. But as a result of that, they largely vote Democratic. But they do have issues that they’re concerned about even within the community. You’re seeing, whether on religious lines, sometimes on even issues like caste, that you are seeing some divergences. In some ways, that’s natural. India’s a very diverse country, and the Indian American diaspora, as it grows, is reflecting that.

Also, some differences between immigrants who are recent immigrants versus those who’ve been there for ages. But you really do see and sometimes a lot of diversity in terms of where in India they come from as well.

DOLLAR: Yeah. So, this essentially migration you’re talking about—many coming as students, but you know, some staying, people settling—I mean, that’s a really important part of globalization. And personally, I’m just very excited to hear the numbers you mentioned. I think it’s a real strength of the United States system that we have this consistent immigration and the sending countries, there’s a lot of research now indicating that there can be benefits in building these ties between different countries. So, all that sounds quite positive.

MADAN: As a beneficiary of it myself, David, having come here for graduate school and done two graduate degrees, I can’t but agree with you. And I think across the board, I hope this is something that is recognized that this the migration and it really does connect societies, economies, and is mutually beneficial.

DOLLAR: And people-to-people. You know, we get all the great Bollywood movies.

MADAN: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Bollywood movies. And you’ve got Padma Lakshmi, too. So, if you like cooking, you get that as well.

DOLLAR: So far, the whole conversation has been a bit of a love fest that, U.S. and India are developing their relations, a lot of positive things developing. If I could mention one thorn in the side of the relationship, it’s the Russian invasion of Ukraine and India’s pretty strong relations with Russia. It’s increasing imports of oil from Russia during this time. Is this likely to be an important issue of discussion or are the two sides just going to accept that this is something we disagree a bit on and just move on to the other areas?

MADAN: I think it’s going to be a bit of both. I think the U.S. and India, I don’t know if they’ve agreed to disagree, but they have accepted or at least tolerate the differences that exist. And they’re doing that, you know, managing this and other differences in part because there is strategic convergence, for instance, on the Indo-Pacific. And both have been prioritizing that, that convergence, both in terms of the goals they share there and the concerns they have about China’s behavior in the region.

But on Russia, you’ve seen, I think also that over the last—you know, this could have been, particularly after the Russian invasion and when India was not voting to condemn Russia at the at the U.N.—it abstained—but nonetheless, that did create some amount of friction, as did its imports of oil. But you’ve seen over time both sides also narrow the gap between each other. They’ve discussed this at various levels consistently. Because one thing India does shares, several of its interests have been adversely affected—economic, energy, others, even geopolitical, by the Russian invasion. And while they might not call it that, they do call it the Russia-Ukraine war, but they do recognize the damage it’s done. And potentially to Russia itself, which they do see as a partner. And so, I think you’ve seen the gap narrowed because of consultations, because of the duration of the war and its continuing impacts across the world.

I think the other aspect you’ve seen is to some extent, just as Indian concerns have grown as, for instance, food, fuel, and fertilizer prices, there’s been pressure on that. But also, as Russia is their largest supplier of defense equipment, and they are unable to pay and Russia is unable to deliver some of that. So, concern about that supply chain as well.

But you’ve also seen on the U.S. side some change where earlier they would consider kind of India’s oil imports a problem. And just to give your audience a sense, India, at the beginning of 2021, if you had looked at the 2022, if you looked at the figures, about 2% of India’s oil imports came from Russia. Now it’s kind of over a quarter of not between a quarter and a third. Earlier, you had the U.S. objecting to it, but then the U.S. recognized that, you know, you actually want I think a lot of energy experts say you don’t want to take this oil off the market. And so, just put a price caps to reduce Russia’s revenue and India has largely imported under that price cap. So, I think that issue has become less thorny.

You’ve also seen India take slightly different, not slightly, but they think a significantly different stance than China. Prime Minister Modi just met with President Zelensky. They’ve spoken multiple times and played a role on specific issues like the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as well as on pressing Russia when it was suspending the Black Sea grain initiative.

So, they’ve taken a slightly different stance, which I think is also eased, eased kind of the differences. But I think the reason that they haven’t been more kind of full of friction is because of that larger strategic convergence, which gives both sides an incentive to manage the differences. But this is a difference that will continue to exist. Russia will remain for because India sees it potentially as a balancing power maybe 20 years from now vis-à-vis China; right now they’re worried about Russia-China relations.

But also it remains, if for no other reason, it is still a lot of Indian frontline military equipment is dependent on Russian spares, on Russian servicing, and is still of Russian or Soviet origin. And that is going to be a generational effort for India to both diversify, which it’s been doing now for the last ten years, but also to indigenize. And that’s the other trend we’re seeing.

DOLLAR: You know, I completely agree with you, Tanvi, about the effects on the oil market. Pre-invasion, basically, Russia was sending about 55% of their petroleum to Europe and about 20% went to China, India if you combine them. And now it’s flipped. More than 50% of their oil is going to China and India, and Europe’s share is down to about 20%. But Russia is exporting about the same amount. And I actually think that’s an advantageous situation because we dodged a big oil price shock. It went up at the beginning of the Ukraine war, but now the price of oil is actually below where it was pre-invasion, and that’s even before you start applying any cap. So, I think we have dodged a big oil shock.

And then on the other hand, the sanctions are keeping Russia from importing a lot of stuff. So, I think the sanctions are working very well on the import side. And all of that creates a situation where the U.S. will probably bring this up with Prime Minister Modi, but it’s, as you say, it’s going to be small within the context of the larger strategic relationship.

MADAN: Yeah. And, you know, this time last year, I don’t think Prime Minister Modi would have been invited for a state dinner, partly because of those differences. But I think, for the reasons you’re saying—and I didn’t realize that those numbers were the case—one of the things this is stirring up into Russia-India case is that India now has this large trade deficit with Russia that I think is only second to their trade deficit with China, which is also massive. And this is creating a problem. And the last time senior Indian officials met their Russian counterparts, they said, Look, this is unsustainable, you know, we need to have more balanced trade. This didn’t really used to be a problem in Russia-India relations.

And it is also a problem that this Russia-India trade that has gone up to close to kind of 30 or maybe just crossed $30 billion is quite unnatural, because before that, for the last 10, 20 years, Russia and India have been trying to increase non-defense trade. It’s remained stuck below $10 billion. So, now it’s gone up, but it’s dependent on this very specific commodity. India doesn’t really import that much, if any, I think, gas or very small quantities of LNG from Russia, and some coal. But it’s largely this one commodity. And I’m sure the Russians are thinking about the fact that just as India increased oil imports, it could just as well decrease them over time and go elsewhere if they get a better deal. So, one questions for the Russians is going to be how long are they going to offer these discounts that these countries are demanding?

DOLLAR: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the G-20, because India for the first time is the president, I guess they call it, of the G-20. And so, Prime Minister Modi will be hosting the other G-20 heads of state, I think, in September, if I—

MADAN: —that’s right, yeah—

DOLLAR: —if I remember correctly. Yeah. So, what’s India trying to do with the G-20? What are some of the main issues and agenda items?

MADAN: David, I will say to start this is not the G-20 India had thought it would be because so much attention is around, you know, whether both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and that impact, and for Prime Minister Modi thinking about the Indians will invite President Putin—they are not signatories to the Rome Statute. So, that question will not arise. Now, whether he goes or not is another matter.

Perhaps even more controversial in India is going to be the presence of Xi Jinping, because the last time he was in India was before the two countries had the boundary crisis in 2020, and he was there in November 2019. The two leaders have not really had a bilateral meeting since then, and Modi and Xi had met a record number of times prior to that, I think about 18 times in over six years.

But for the G-20 itself, I think these are going to be the sideline issues, which is who is actually going to make it, this kind of tension between the West and Russia and China. But also, I think on the substantive issue, India has really actually invested a lot over this last year into this process—hosted a number of ministerials, had working groups. And they focused largely, I’d say, you know, the one word I can put it is “development,” inclusive and resilient growth is how they’re thinking about it.

And this has got to many aspects. There’s the more proactive delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals, thinking about green growth is another emphasis. Women’s empowerment and women-led initiatives has been another aspect of development.

But you’ve also seen, I think, India try to use the G-20 to showcase kind of some digital technology solutions, and particularly its digital public infrastructure, what they call the India stack, which they both use the G-20 meetings to showcase to those visiting, but also to try to kind of say, look, this is a more open alternative to—and they never use the word China—to those that our closed systems are offering.

Now in the West, I think people have a different kind of maybe view of some of these some of the spots of infrastructure. But nonetheless, I think what India is doing is more broadly bringing focus to the idea of digital public infrastructure as something that can really facilitate inclusivity and development as well. And that’s been the kind of more proactive side.

I think the reactive side on the development has been really to discuss and deal with the fallout of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of COVID as well, and countries kind of still suffering from that. And that’s been both in terms of thinking about food, fuel, fertilizer, security, but also in terms of the debt crisis that in some cases is looming, in some cases we’ve already seen in India’s neighborhood, both in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, real kind of economic setbacks, because of the kind of debt crises that both have.

So, I think there’s been both this proactive and reactive element to India’s G-20. And then another issue, which is kind of across the board, both in terms of global economic governance as well as across other institutions, and India’s talking about as it looks at G-20 as a multilateral institution, the need to reform actual multilateral institutions, and not just for itself, but saying developing countries need a bigger role. It already has and it likely will ahead of the G-20 summit host something like a Voice of Global South Summit to say, look, that is an important aspect. Can’t just be these 20 countries.

So, the way that the Modi government has portrayed it as, you know, we are a bridge between the North and the South, the East and the West, and I think they will try to reflect that.

And then finally, I think for an Indian objective, or rather the Modi government’s objective with the G-20 is going back to that aspect that I mentioned in terms of the state visit, which is political, that again, this fits into Prime Minister Modi’s showcasing India as on the high table, so to speak, and that, you know, he will say he’s played a role. Some of his critics say, well, you know, it’s the G-20, it rotates. So, it’s not that it’s being held because you’re prime minister. But nonetheless, he is showcasing it. And he’s made it a point to host these meetings around the country, so not just in New Delhi. It’s probably nicer for visitors as well that they get to go to Goa and the Andamans and not just a conference room in Delhi. But, this really has been part of has been for him a political instrument as well.

DOLLAR: Last topic, Tanvi, is let’s just talk a little bit more about India’s trade and investment policies. One of the fun things I got to do in the World Bank was visit quite a few factories in India. This would have been 20 years ago, basically, more than 20 years ago. And I remember visiting some auto plants, actually making auto parts, and everything was a joint venture. I’m not going to name companies, but a joint venture between an Indian company and a big international, well-named company. And these were 50-50 joint ventures. There was a lot of tensions and problems and low productivity, frankly. As I see it, India has really opened up quite a few sectors, including automotive, to 100% foreign investment. So, I haven’t had a chance to visit factories recently, but from the data it seems like India is really becoming more open. Is that real and is that likely to continue? And how do Indian people feel about this?

MADAN: It’s quite interesting. What you have seen is a Modi government that initially when they came in was one that in fact moved backwards in terms of … it did open up. In the investment side that was true. They opened up a number of sectors, including to 100% FDI. But on the trade side, they were a little bit more protectionist. They basically said, We don’t want to do bilateral investment treaties, we don’t want to do free trade agreements. The ones that India had done were considered to have not been free and fair. And so, they really had the attitude that these agreements weren’t good. They increased import duties on several inputs, industrial inputs. And so, they were seen as more protectionist than previous governments and perhaps the most protectionist in the trade space at least since India started liberalizing in the 1990s.

Now, there were other reforms that they did undertake that also did help in terms of the business environment, including in the banking sector, including in terms of now building infrastructure across the board. And so, that’s helped.

But what you’ve also seen simultaneously is a Modi government shift in recent years on trade. It’s not suddenly a free trader on the whole, but it has become more open to bilateral trade agreements with what they call “trusted partners.” And so you’ve seen India sign a trade agreement, an initial trade agreement, with Australia, with the UAE. They’re being negotiated with the UK, with Canada, the EU-India trade negotiations have been revived as well. Currently the U.S., we’re not interested in trade deals, otherwise I’m sure they would have wanted to talk about that. They did join at least three of the four pillars of IPEF, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. And so, you’re starting to see them rethink this aspect.

Now, one of the reasons they’re doing this is because just as they are trying to kind of reduce their exposure to China in particular—China’s their second largest trading partner, but also is the main source of the Indian deficit; and also because of their border crisis, there’s just a more intense competition, India’s concerned about its vulnerability in the economic space and this overdependence—and so, as they tried to reduce their own exposure, they’ve been trying to diversify their suppliers. And so, that’s helped them rethink trade.

But at the same time, they’re also trying to take advantage of other countries trying to diversify. And so, in this space, both on the manufacturing and trade side, you’ve seen, for example, an Apple start to say that we want to produce in India, move some amount of production and some to Vietnam as well. But you’ve also seen India then having to adjust where one of the things that a company like that says is, Look, we’re not going to move our entire supply chain there. We still need to be able to import from China. And so, India’s adjust to that and is making exceptions.

So, you have seen the government rethink this. They’ve got something called a production-linked incentive scheme in particular sectors where they are trying to diversify like electronics, like pharmaceuticals, like solar power. And so, they have been more open in that sense.

There is also the sense, and they’re quite open about it, where there is this emphasis on what they call atmanirbhar Bharat —self-reliance. And I think where the tug is just domestically in the debate is what does the self-reliance mean? Does it mean self-sufficiency on one end of the spectrum, or does it mean resilience in the sense of having some amount of domestic production, but also diversifying kind of a mixture of friend-shoring and reshoring or on-shoring? And I think this debate continues in India. Where do you … there is a sense from some foreign companies that India does put its thumb on its scale for domestic companies. India argues that all countries do that. But I think you’ve seen really this push and pull. You see it constantly in the Indian government’s approach. And sometimes you could see that they do move on these issues.

But really to me this is the fundamental debate, not just in the economic arena but across the board, is this debate over how open to be to the world. In the geopolitical space, how open to be to partners, how close to get to partners; and in the economic space and technology space how much to really work with others, like-minded countries. And you have some like the external affairs ministers who’ve said, Look, we have to make choices because globalization and technology aren’t economic issues, they’re strategic issues. So, we have to be open, but we have to be open to just more trusted partners, or as they call them, trusted geographies. So, I think, that’s where you’re probably seeing India come down.

DOLLAR: I’m David Dollar and I’ve been talking to my colleague Tanvi Madan about India, fifth biggest economy in the world, fastest growing big economy. So, probably going to move up to number three before too long and punching pretty strongly in the world economy both economically and politically. So, thank you for all those insights, Tanvi, as we await Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the United States.

MADAN: Thanks so much, David.

DOLLAR: Thank you all for listening. We release new episodes of Dollar and Sense every other week. So, if you haven’t already, follow us wherever you get podcasts and stay tuned.

It’s made possible by support from supervising producer Kuwilileni Hauwanga; producer Fred Dews; audio engineer Gastón Reboredo; and other Brookings colleagues. Show art is by Katie Merris.

If you have questions about the show or episode suggestions, you can email us at Podcasts at Brookings dot edu. Dollar and Sense is part of the Brookings Podcast Network. Find more podcasts on our website, Brookings dot edu slash Podcasts.

Until next time, I’m David Dollar and this has been Dollar and Sense .

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February 21, 2024

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India's Modi starts Washington visit to build Biden, US ties

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• Indian prime minister in Washington for two days
• US and India to announce defense and technology agreements
• Activists' concerns linger about human rights under Modi

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Jeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in advocating for press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His and the WHCA's work was recognized with Deutsche Welle's "Freedom of Speech Award." Jeff has asked pointed questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA's “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure" award and co-winner of the Association for Business Journalists' "Breaking News" award. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a former Fulbright scholar.

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PM Modi’s US visit ends: Here are some highlights

Prime minister modi wrapped up his three-day state visit to the united states with an address to the indian community members..

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrapped up his state visit to the United States on Friday. The three-day state visit,  his first in nine years,  included at least three meetings with President Joe Biden, an address to members of the US Congress, and interactions with some of Silicon Valley’s top CEOs.

“Concluding a very special USA visit, where I got to take part in numerous programmes and interactions aimed at adding momentum to the India-USA friendship. Our nations will keep working together to make our planet a better place for the coming generations,” PM Modi tweeted, ahead of his departure. He is now headed to Egypt for another state visit.

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Here’s a round-up of the significant events from PM Modi’s official three-day State visit to the US as a representative of the Republic of India:

PM Modi delivers goodbye speech to Indian-American diaspora

“‘Together India and US are not just forming policies and agreements, we are shaping lives, dreams and destinies," said PM Narendra Modi addressing the Indian-American community at the end of his three-day state visit to the US.

“The partnership between India and the United States will make the world better in the 21st Century. You all play a crucial role in this partnership,” he added while speaking at Ronald Reagan Center, Washington on Friday.

At the heart of the Indo-US strategic partnership is deepening economic engagement and resolve on both sides to elevate the bilateral relationship to a “global strategic partnership”. Concluding the hour-long address amid cheers and chants of Bharat Mata ki Jai, the PM said, “I can sense a mini-India converging here. I thank you all for coming here. I have received unprecedented love and affection during my stay in the US.”

A joint statement is issued by India and the United States

India and the US have agreed on a broad sweep in ties , declaring that “no corner of human enterprise is untouched by the partnership between our two great countries, which spans the seas to the stars”. A 58-paragraph joint statement was issued after the bilateral meeting between PM Modi and President Joe Biden. The statement called on Pakistan to take action to ensure that no territory under its control is used for launching terrorist attacks. However, there was  no mention of Russia or the US formulation on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

A celebrity-studded state dinner in honour of PM Modi is organised

“Two great nations, two great friends, and two great powers. Cheers,” US President Biden told PM Modi in a toast at the state dinner Thursday hosted by US President at White House. Both the leaders expressed that the occasion celebrates great bonds of friendship between India and the United States. They hailed a new era in their nation’s relationship and spoke about deals on defence and commerce, which are aimed at countering China’s influence.

Big names in the tech world and billionaire industrialists such as Mukesh Ambani, Google CEO Sunder Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook were among those invited to the State Dinner hosted in the honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House on Thursday.

PM Modi addresses the US Congress, becoming the first Indian prime minister to do so twice

In an almost one hour speech to the US Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi touched upon a variety of themes ranging from the Ukraine war to terrorism to women's empowerment to environment concerns. They were met with applause and standing ovation several times by the US Congress members, including Vice President Kamala Harris.  “When India grows, it influences and uplifts everyone,” he told the American parliament.

The speech this time was longer in duration than last time, which was about 45 minutes in 2016.

Modi-Biden hold joint press conference at the White House

At a joint press conference with US President Joe Biden at the White House, PM Modi declares that the partnership between India and the US knows no bounds. At the press conference where the leaders took questions from one reporter from each side, Biden by his side, PM Modi said   Thursday that “democracy is in our DNA”, and “there is absolutely no question of discrimination” regardless of “caste, creed, religion and gender”. He was responding to a journalist’s question about what steps his government is willing to take to improve the rights of minorities in India and to uphold free speech.

Bilateral meeting takes place at the White House

The bilateral meeting between PM Modi and US President Joe Biden took place at the White House ahead of the former's address at the US Congress. White House officials previewed the possible outcomes of the official meet : a mega deal on the purchase of General Atomics MQ-9 “Reaper” armed drones by India, a joint mission by the NASA and ISRO to the International Space Station in 2024 and New Delhi joining the Artemis Accords, which brings like-minded countries together on civil space exploration.

Biden by his side in the East Room of the White House, Modi, too, headlined the strategic outcomes in his statement after the bilateral meeting between the two sides.

PM Modi presents an array of special gifts to President Biden and US First Lady

PM Modi presented an array of special gifts to US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden when they hosted him for a private dinner at the White House on Tuesday. The gifts included a lab-grown 7.5-carat green diamond and a handcrafted sandalwood box. Biden was also presented with the first edition print of the book  The Ten Principal Upanishads  from 1937.

A warm welcome for PM Modi at the White House

PM Narendra Modi received a warm welcome Thursday by United States president Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden, as he arrived at White House to attend bilateral talks with US President Joe Biden, attend a State dinner and address the US Congress. His state visit to the US as a representative of the Republic of India set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming world order, where India needs to keep both its strategic independence and geopolitical balance.

PM Modi leads International Yoga Day celebrations at UN headquarters

Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led yoga session at United Nations headquarters, on the occasion of 9th International Yoga Day , created Guinness World Record for participation of people of most nationalities , according to officials.

PM Modi arrives in New York, meets Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday arrived in New York on the first leg of his maiden state visit to the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden. H e met several business and thought leaders like Tesla CEO Elon Musk , Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He also met with experts in healthcare, tech and education sectors and discussed the National Education policy, tuberculosis elimination efforts and policymaking, among other topics.

PM Modi leaves for US

PM Modi landed in New York late Tuesday evening, marking the beginning of his first State visit to the US, which he said “will reinforce ties based on shared values of democracy, diversity and freedom" with new milestones in the India-US relationship in Washington.

His packed state visit to the US from June 21 to June 23 upon the invitation of US President Joe Biden notably included International Yoga Day celebrations, a state dinner, bilateral meetings with  Biden, a US Congress address and a speech to the Indian-American diaspora.

• Modi in US 2023

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Modi in US: How big change on H1-B visa renewal will benefit Indians in America?

Since 2004, Indian professionals on H1-B visas have had to return home to get the extension stamped on their passports. The new plan will let thousands of workers continue their jobs without needing to travel back to India and take an appointment at a consulate

The United States has announced it will introduce ‘in-country’ renewable H-1B visas.

The development comes amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first state visit to the United States.

A senior administration official, speaking ahead of the bilateral meeting between Modi and President Joe Biden at the White House on Thursday, said this is part of the people-to-people initiative.

But how will the big change help Indian workers?

Let’s take a closer look:

What is an H1-B visa?

The much-sought-after H-1B Visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations – such as technology, finance, engineering, and architecture – which require theoretical or technical expertise.

According to Boundless.com, such workers usually have a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent.

Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

According to Business Insider , though the visa is usually issued for three years, it can be extended up to six years.

What is the H1-B renewal process?

Until 2004, certain categories of non-immigrant visas, particularly the H-1B, could be renewed or stamped inside the US.

But since then, for the renewal of these visas, in particular, those with H-1B visas, the foreign tech workers have to go out of the country, mostly to their own country to get the H-1B extension stamped on their passport.

For all the H-1B visa holders, when their visa is renewed, they need to get their passports stamped with renewal dates.

This is required if they wish to travel outside of the US and re-enter the US.

As of now, H-1B visa restamping is not allowed within the US.

Restamping can only be done at any US consulate.

This was a big inconvenience for foreign guest workers and also for their employees, particularly at a time when the visa wait time is more than 800 days or more than two years.

How will this help?

According to Reuters , under the pilot programme being planned by the US, some Indian and other foreign workers on H-1B visas will be able to renew those visas within the country, without having to travel abroad.

The programme may be expanded later.

This will thus help thousands of Indian professionals staying in the US continue their jobs without the hassle of travelling overseas for the renewal of their work visas.

As Shwetha Parekh, who stays in the US on an H-1B Visa told Business Insider . “The backlog was so much that when I tried to book an appointment in 2021, I was getting one only six months later. I wanted to come back home to meet my family but could not, as if I stepped out, I could not re-enter the US.”

Renewing these visas will thus become both easy and cost-effective, as per the outlet.

Indian citizens are by far the most active users of the US H-1B program and made up 73 per cent of the nearly 442,000 H-1B workers in fiscal year 2022.

Each year, the US government makes 65,000 H-1B visas available to companies seeking skilled foreign workers, along with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees.

The companies using the most H-1B workers in recent years include the Indian-based Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services as well as Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in the US, according to US government data.

“…the United States Department of State is going to launch a pilot to adjudicate domestic renewals of certain petition-based temporary work visas later this year, including for Indian nationals with the intent to implement this for an expanded pool of H-1 and L visa holders,” a senior Biden administration official said.

“The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to two years,” the spokesperson told Reuters while declining to define small.

**‘Good for people in India’** US visas for Indians

Over the past few months, the Biden administration has taken several steps to streamline the visa processing system and reduce inconveniences.

The US last year issued 125,000 visas to Indian students, which is a record and they are on pace to become the largest foreign student community in the United States with a 20 per cent increase last year alone, the official explained.

The programme would be eventually broadened to include other eligible categories.

“It is good for people in India, good for people in the United States, really good for our businesses,” said the official.

“We all recognise that mobility of our people is a huge asset to us,” said another US official. “And so our goal is to approach that in a sort of multifaceted way. The State Department already has been working very hard to find creative ways to make changes to things.”

India has long had concerns with the difficulty its citizens face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including technology industry workers. More than 10 million jobs stood open in the United States at the end of April, according to the Labor Department.

“The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to two years,” the spokesperson said, while declining to define small.

The pilot program would also include some workers with L-1 visas, which are available to people transferring within a company to a position in the US, one of the sources said.

The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to renew visas in the US would free up resources for visa interviews in consulates abroad, the spokesperson said.

Some H-1B visa holders in the US have been among the thousands of tech workers laid off this year, sending them scrambling to find new employers within a 60-day “grace period” or return to their home country.

The Biden administration has spent months working to improve visa access for Indians, trying to get around the lack of political will in Congress to comprehensively reform US immigration policy. President Joe Biden wants to knit together the world’s two largest democracies, partly in a bid to better compete with China.

A separate initiative to clear a backlog of visa applications at US embassies in India is finally showing signs of progress, according to another one of those sources, and is expected to be figure into the discussions between the two countries’ delegations in Washington this week.

US visa services are still attempting to clear a backlog after Washington halted almost all visa processing worldwide in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The visa backlog has led to some families being separated for extended periods of time, with some taking to social media to lament their situation.

With inputs from agencies

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PM Modi to Create History on His First Official Visit to USA; Everything from State Dinner to Bilateral Talks to Diaspora Meetings

Indian VVIPs’ flying fortress, Air India One B777 which got a Rs-8400cr makeover in 2020, is getting ready for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sixth trip but first state visit to the United States . Scheduled from 21 to 24 June 2023, PM Modi is visiting the US at the invitation of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. India’s former President S Radhakrishnan and former PM Manmohan Singh were Modiji’s predecessors to have been bestowed the honor of an official visit to America in 1963 and 2009 respectively.

PM Modi’s official US visit in 2023 is highly anticipated to create history, as he will be addressing a joint meeting of the US Congress at the Capitol on June 23 . This is one of the most prestigious honors that White House accords to the political heads of foreign countries in good relations with America. The Indian American community and corporate honchos of the US, including CEOs of top conglomerates are gearing up to welcome him. The stupendous success of the “Howdy Modi!” event in Houston, which the Indian-origin leaders of Texas had organized during Modi’s trip in 2019, is a litmus taste to his popularity overseas.

The schedule of Modi’s first state visit to USA is full of events starting with the International Yoga Day celebration at the UN headquarters in New York City on June 21. On the same day, he would fly to Washington DC, where his stay will be arranged at Blair House. Adjudged as “the world’s most exclusive hotel”, Blair House is the US President’s guest house for visiting foreign dignitaries. He would be treated as an honorable state guest there.

June 21 will end with a private dinner that the Bidens will host at the White House in honor of PM Modi, following an event with Dr. Jill Biden , an advocate of educational opportunities. The pre-dinner event is likely to culminate in a discussion on the prospects of creating a bridge between US universities and the top institutes in India. On June 22, Modi will be given a grand welcome at the South Lawns of the White House, according to his US visit 2023 schedule. Reportedly, thousands of Indian American leaders from different walks of life would attend the welcome ceremony.

PM Modi’s first official visit to Washington DC is being hailed as a milestone in the US-India relationship . The President of the world’s biggest economy and the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy will have a one-on-one talk in the Oval Office where a ceremonial lamp is lit to celebrate Diwali every year. It will be followed by a delegation-level meeting at the Capitol where Modi will address the joint session of the US Congress in the afternoon of June 22.

In the evening, PM Modi will be treated to the state dinner at the White House. Over 250 delegates, including the crème de la crème of the diverse Indian American community, will join him at dinner. The state guest and the delegates in attendance will get to see some cultural programs reflecting the beauty of India.

A lavish luncheon with Vice president Kamala Harris and the Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also on the schedule of Modi’s 2023 trip to USA . The luncheon will be arranged in the Benjamin Franklin Room of the State Department on June 23. In addition to diplomatic discussions with the leaders in President Biden’s cabinet, Modi will honor invitations by Indian Diaspora in America. Leading diaspora groups, such as Indiaspora, will host him at Ronald Regan Center in Washington DC on June 23 . The program is named “We The People: Celebrating the US-India Partnership”. Another diaspora gathering is likely to be organized at John F. Kennedy Center by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF).

“Political mavericks of the US are looking forward to Indian PM Modi’s address to a joint session of the Congress at the Capitol. They are expecting to hear Modi about India’s neutral stance on the Russian-Ukraine conflict, and India’s denial of United Airlines’ application for regulatory approvals to codeshare with Emirates flights to and from India. It is also anticipated that Indian-origin leaders from Texas, California, Seattle, Atlanta, Florida, and Michigan would petition to PM Modi for nonstop flights to India , which they had done before,” said Sourav Agarwal, the Editor of Travel Beats, a leading portal for Indian Diaspora by Indian Eagle Travel .

The excitement about PM Modi’s visit is so high in Indian Diaspora that Shripad Kulkarni, the chef of a New Jersey Indian restaurant named Mehek, has launched a special ‘Modi Ji Thali’ in his honor.

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Modi’s U.S. visit sends a big, if quiet, signal to China

Though the White House downplays it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swing through Washington is about enhancing a partnership that includes stopping Beijing’s aggressive expansion

Joint statements issued by the United States and India over the last several years have condemned North Korea’s missile tests, called for the Taliban to respect human rights and appealed for an end to the violence in Myanmar. But never has there been an outright mention of India’s primary adversary: China.

Yet it is China in recent years that has supplanted Pakistan as India’s main security threat. While Delhi may wish to minimize accusations that can heighten tensions with leadership in Beijing, China’s clashes with India along its border have turned the world’s two most populous countries into rivals again in the Indo-Pacific.

It is the resurgence of that rivalry — after decades of détente — that has made for a convergence of strategic interests between the United States and India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington this week, with the full pomp and circumstance of a state visit that comes on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tense trip to China , followed by President Biden’s comments on Tuesday calling Xi Jinping a “dictator.”

Neither Biden nor Modi would frame their engagement as primarily being about containing the China challenge, but the subtext is plain. Rather, officials say, it is about lifting up a rising power — the world’s largest democracy, if an imperfect one — and showcasing the momentum in the relationship based on a set of shared interests.

“This visit is not about China,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview with reporters this week. “But the question of China’s role in the military domain, the technology domain, the economic domain will be on the agenda.”

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Modi's White House visit tests Biden's democracy-vs.-autocracy pitch

A series of major announcements are expected Thursday, including a major deal to manufacture General Electric fighter - jet engines in India and a deal in which Delhi will buy General Atomics armed drones, a platform the Indians have wanted for years and which can help them detect and counter moves by China’s military.

The GE deal, anticipated to be worth billions of dollars, involves the provision of sophisticated jet engine technology that has never been shared even with treaty allies, and has the potential to bind the two countries’ defense industries for years to come.

“It’s coveted sensitive technology — something India’s been asking for, for almost two decades,” said Sameer Lalwani, a senior expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “If it works, it could lead to multiple future generations of jet engines. This is a way for the United States to both be a partner to and shape India’s defense innovation developments over the next 20 to 30 years.”

While the main partner is expected to be a state-owned company, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, officials say there are likely to be private-sector suppliers as India seeks to develop its domestic defense industry. The Modi government realizes that to compete with China, which is well into a decades-long military modernization campaign, it will need to figure out how to advance tech start-ups so they can design technologies at military scale.

Pulling down hurdles to tech and defense collaboration is a key theme of Modi’s visit. Administration officials, from Biden and Sullivan to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, have met with Delhi counterparts, and officials in both countries have worked to cut through licensing, export control and other barriers to cooperation.

On the technology front, another major expected announcement involves Micron Technology Inc., the biggest U.S. memory-chipmaker. The two leaders are expected to announce that the Boise, Idaho-based tech giant is building a chip assembly, testing and packaging plant in Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

The deal would represent the first major investment by an American firm as part of the administration’s “national mission on semiconductors” to rebalance supply chains away from China, which sealed itself off from the world for almost three years during the coronavirus pandemic. Significantly, Delhi is expected to finance more than half of the multibillion-dollar project, officials said, and this week authorized “production linked incentives” worth $1.34 billion.

From India’s perspective, these initiatives fulfill two broad objectives, said Arvind Subramanian, Modi’s chief economic adviser from 2014 to 2018. The GE deal, for instance, is part of a long-running effort to wean India off its reliance on Russia for military equipment, said Subramanian, now a senior fellow at Brown University.

As Modi visits White House, India's reliance on Russian arms constrains him

The chip plant and defense deals serve Delhi’s goal of revitalizing a moribund manufacturing sector. To entice foreign investment, the government several years ago launched a major program of subsidies — just as investors were seeking alternative locations to China during the pandemic.

But whether these investments will pay off depends on whether India can change its regulatory culture, reform an over-intrusive state and end arbitrary enforcement of laws, Subramanian said. “It’s an open question,” he said. “It’s not a done deal.”

Meanwhile, China casts an outsize shadow on the region, with its aggressive actions against Taiwan after a visit to Taipei last August by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), its massive military modernization , and dangerous maneuvers in proximity to U.S., Australian and Canadian ships and jets in the Pacific Ocean.

India, which will host the G-20 summit of world leaders this year, aspires to great-power status in its own right. Eschewing explicit alignment with either Russia or China, it has positioned itself as a champion of the developing world.

“India is clearly in a category of its own, in terms of our alliances and partnerships in a number of ways,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. “I think we are like-minded on the balance of issues.”

Modi last month was warmly greeted when he visited a number of Pacific Island nations, a region in which both the United States and China are vying for influence. He flew to Papua New Guinea — a stop that was supposed to be in tandem with Biden after both leaders attended the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. But Biden canceled that leg of his trip to return to Washington to deal with a debt ceiling crisis. Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape hailed Modi as “the leader of the Global South.”

While Modi is held up as a voice of developing countries that do not wish to be forced to choose between the United States and China, he is also a lightning rod for criticism over his government’s treatment of its Muslim minority population, and crackdowns on the press and political opposition. That troubling tilt toward illiberalism is the unspoken tension in the Washington visit.

Administration officials, however, prefer to stress the strategic role India can play as a key economic and military partner in the Indo-Pacific and bulwark against China, though they rarely — if ever — in joint statements explicitly mention China.

“You hear us talking a lot about a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner said in an interview. “A strong India and a strong U.S.-India partnership is central to achieving that vision.” That’s why, he said, “the relationship matters.”

Officials in Washington are clear that India will never be a treaty ally in the manner of Japan or Australia. And they understand that Delhi has no intention to give up its strategic autonomy or seek to be seen as aligned with NATO and the West. Modi’s government has refused to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine or join in sanctions.

What’s manifestly changed in the last decade is how India perceives China as a threat. The two countries have been fighting a bitter, bloody battle along their Himalayan border since 2020, one that has claimed 20 Indian lives.

Public opinion in India on China is the lowest it has been since the 1962 war, in which China invaded India. Delhi has banned TikTok, along with more than 100 Chinese apps. It has effectively barred Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G networks.

Though observers are tempted to reduce the U.S.-India relationship to a shared interest in countering China — a version of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” — the U.S. investment in India does not involve any expectation that Delhi will aid Washington in defending Taiwan should China invade, administration officials said.

“We’re not making a bet on some future war and whether we’re fighting alongside each other in that war,” Sullivan said. “We’re making a bet that in a variety of areas that matter fundamentally to the economic resilience of the United States, to the success and vitality of an open technology ecosystem, to diversified and resilient supply chains — the things that are core to the Biden foreign policy, that India can play a very constructive role in those areas.”

Countering Chinese military aggression is an effort that has engaged a number of countries around the world in ways that do not involve them shooting at ships in the Taiwan Strait, officials point out.

“[T]here’s a convergence of … interests that can protect the autonomy of India while at the same time deepen the strategic partnership with the United States,” Sullivan said. “And we see no contradiction between those two things.”

Gerry Shih contributed to this report.

The Economic Times daily newspaper is available online now.

Biden administration drops travel abroad requirement for skilled workers renewing h-1b visas.

Until 2004, certain categories of non-immigrant visas, particularly the H-1B, could be renewed or stamped inside the US. After that, for the renewal of these visas, in particular, those on H-1B, the foreign tech workers have to go out of the country, mostly to their own country to get the H-1B extension stamped on their passport. Restamping can only be done at any US consulate.

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Biden signs executive action drastically tightening border

WASHINGTON — Facing mounting political pressure over the migrant influx at the southern border, President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive action that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry, according to a senior administration official.

“The border is not a political issue to be weaponized," Biden said in a White House speech announcing the order.

The shutdown would go into effect immediately since that threshold has already been met, a senior administration official said. The border would reopen only once that number falls to 1,500. The president’s order would come under the Immigration and Nationality Act sections 212(f) and 215(a) suspending entry of noncitizens who cross the southern border into the United States unlawfully. 

Senior administration officials said Tuesday in a call with reporters that “individuals who cross the southern border unlawfully or without authorization will generally be ineligible for asylum, absent exceptionally compelling circumstances, unless they are accepted by the proclamation.”

The officials said that migrants who don’t meet the requirement of having a "credible fear" when they apply for asylum will be immediately removable, and they “anticipate that we will be removing those individuals in a matter of days, if not hours,”

The White House conveyed details of the long-awaited move to lawmakers on Monday , but confirmed details of the executive action Tuesday morning ahead of planned remarks by the president in the East Room of the White House alongside mayors from several border towns.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Texas state Rep. Eddie Morales Jr., whose district includes Eagle Pass. “One of a number of steps that are necessary for us to be able to secure the border.”

In 2018, the Trump administration tried to enact similar border restrictions but courts blocked them. The Biden administration now expects to defend the executive action against legal challenges.

The executive action will also have some exceptions, including for unaccompanied children. 

In a written statement, Donald Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavett claimed that exception would give a “green light to child traffickers and sex traffickers” while reiterating the former president’s rallying cry that “the border invasion and migrant crime will not stop until Crooked Joe Biden is deported from the White House.”

Republican lawmakers are slamming the move as too little, too late. 

“(Biden) created a crisis at the border intentionally,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. “(The executive action) has more political risk than political benefit, particularly because his own base is going to reject it.”

But the White House has repeatedly argued that it was congressional Republicans who have failed to act on immigration. Earlier this year, Trump urged House GOP members to kill a bipartisan border funding bill that had been negotiated in the Senate. At the time, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans said that the Senate bill didn’t go far enough and they argued that a more hard-line immigration bill in the House was preferable. 

“President Biden has led a historic opening of lawful pathways for individuals to and including families, to enter the United States through a lawful process, including the CBP One mobile application to request an appointment to present at a port of entry, as well as family reunification programs in countries throughout the region and a historic parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans,” a senior administration official said. “And so this measure that we are announcing today comes alongside those lawful pathways,”

The executive action comes on the heels of a  historic presidential election in Mexico  and just as the campaign in the U.S. ramps up. Trump has a  30-point edge with registered voters  on the question of which candidate would better handle immigration and border security, including a 23-point edge among Latino voters, according to a late-March CNBC national poll.

Many immigrant advocates are furious at the president’s harsher immigration policies and argue the changes will cause chaos.

“It is a betrayal of what we were told in his campaign four years ago,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director for the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “We were told that President Biden would be restoring humanity at our border. … But what we are seeing is that history is repeating itself.”

Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants’ Rights Project who argued the challenge to asylum restrictions during the Trump administration, said the advocacy group planned to sue.

“ A ban on asylum is illegal just as it was when Trump unsuccessfully tried it,” Gelernt said in a statement.

Gelernt on Tuesday said the ACLU was still working out the timing of the lawsuit and where it would be filed during an interview with NBC News' Tom Llamas.

"I'm hoping that we can convince the administration, if not the courts, that this is misguided and illegal, and maybe the administration can pull it back or mitigate it," Gelernt said.

When asked about potential lawsuits during a call with reporters on Tuesday, a senior administration official said the agency was "prepared" for any forthcoming legal battles.

“I think we are accustomed to being litigated, frankly, from both sides of the political spectrum, for just about any measure we take in this space, and that is just yet another sign that there is no lasting solution to the challenges we are facing without Congress doing its job,” the official said.

CORRECTION (June 5, 2024 10:05 a.m. ET) A previous version of this article misstated the last name of the Texas state representative who represents Eagle Pass. He is Eddie Morales Jr. not Jones Jr.

Gabe Gutierrez is a senior White House correspondent for NBC News.

Monica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.

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Biden poised to announce immigration relief for spouses of US citizens, sources say

US President Joe Biden could soon announce a new effort to allow immigrants in the US illegally to obtain legal status if they are married to US citizens, three sources said, an election-year move that could energize some liberal voters.

Biden is expected to unveil the effort as soon as Tuesday at a White House event, two of the sources said, requesting anonymity to discuss internal plans still subject to change.

Biden, a Democrat, is seeking a second term in the November 5 election that will pit him against Republican challenger Donald Trump, an immigration hardliner.

Biden has grappled with record numbers of migrants caught crossing the US-Mexico border illegally on his watch and recently rolled out a restrictive new asylum ban at the border to deter crossers.

Some fellow Democrats and immigrant advocates opposed the asylum ban and have called on Biden to protect long-term US residents who lack legal status, including spouses.

Reuters reported in April that the White House was considering ways to allow the spouses to obtain legal status.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez did not confirm any coming immigration relief, but said in a statement that Biden officials “remain committed to taking action to address our broken immigration system.”

Biden said in June 4 remarks on the asylum ban that in coming weeks he would “speak to how we can make our immigration system more fair and more just.”

Tuesday’s White House event will be tied to the anniversary of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The DACA program was launched by former President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden and currently grants deportation relief and work permits to 528,000 people brought to the US as children.

The US State Department also could roll out new guidance that says DACA recipients should be presumed eligible for non-immigrant visas if they leave the US, one of the sources said.

Representative Nanette Barragan, a Democrat and head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said she would attend the White House event and urged Biden to take action to protect spouses of US. citizens and DACA recipients.

Barragan said in an interview that Biden could contrast himself with Trump, who has vowed to launch the largest deportation effort in US history.

“I think it could be significant for the lives of these people who are living in the shadows, who are married to American citizens and who are under threat of being removed from the country,” she said.

An estimated 1.1 million immigrants in the US illegally are married to US citizens, according to data by advocacy organization FWD.us, but how many of those would be included in a possible Biden action remained unclear.

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If you are a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, you may be able to sponsor a family member for a Permanent Resident Card (Green Card). Learn about the process and who is eligible.

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Applying for a family-based immigrant visa is the first step in the process for the person you are sponsoring to become a permanent resident. There are two categories of this type of visa:

Immediate relative visas

These visas are for close relatives of U.S. citizens, such as spouses, unmarried children under 21, or parents. An unlimited number of visas are available for this visa category. These visas include:

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Family preference visas

A limited number of family preference visas are set aside each year for:

• F1 visas unmarried children who are 21 years of age or older
• F3 visas for married children
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• F2A visas for spouses and unmarried children under age 21
• F2B visas for unmarried children who are 21 years of age or older

Check the U.S. Department of State’s chart of immigrant visa categories to learn more about each category of immediate relative and family sponsored visas .

How to apply for permanent residency for a family member

To sponsor your family member, submit a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Form I-130 . Each person you sponsor needs a separate Form I-130. You can submit the form online or by mail.

The process for your relative to immigrate to the U.S. requires that both you, as the sponsor, and your relative, as the visa applicant, complete the necessary steps.

The process is different depending on whether your family member is already in the U.S. or abroad.

• If your family member is in the U.S. - Learn about Adjustment of Status
• If your family member is outside the U.S. - Learn the steps for Consular Processing

Submitting Form I-130 is the first step of the immigration visa process. Learn what other steps are involved , including:

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LAST UPDATED: December 8, 2023

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