Why Trump's America can't do without Indians
At this year’s Jackson Hole symposium, the annual gathering of the world’s central banking elite, a sobering consensus emerged for the developed economies. Top central bankers warned that the world’s largest economies will lack the workers they need to power growth and keep prices stable in the coming decades unless they attract more foreigners. Central bankers from EU, Japan and the UK said migrant labour has already played a central role in stabilising their economies and will be critical for the decades ahead. The symposium, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, was titled “Labour Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy.”
While the US was not directly cited in these comments, the warning bells may well have been rung for the world's richest economy. The central message that economic stability will depend increasingly on immigration couldn’t be more applicable to the current American trajectory under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has been steadily reshaping US immigration policy to reflect a " Hire American" ethos that is often hostile to foreign workers. In this context, India stands out because much of the ire at foreign workers in the US is directed at Indians who are seen to be snatching well-paid tech jobs from Americans. India continues to be the top source of H-1B visa recipients.
Indians in the US: Indispensable but on target
Most of the highly-skilled workers entering the US through the H-1B visa program are Indians. According to USCIS, nearly 70% of H-1B visas approved in FY 2024 were granted to Indian nationals, a staggering share that reflects India’s outsize contribution to America’s STEM ecosystem. From Silicon Valley coders to Wall Street quants, Indian professionals form the technical backbone of many of the nation’s most critical industries.
Despite this, the Trump administration continues to push for regulatory and procedural changes that disproportionately impact this very demographically. A proposed move to scrap the random H-1B lottery system and replace it with a wage-based selection would favor experienced, often already-employed, professionals at the expense of younger, early-career candidates. This directly threatens thousands of Indian graduates transitioning from US universities to the workforce, potentially cutting off a vital pipeline of future engineers, data scientists and researchers.
Other measures, such as enhanced social media vetting and the suspension of new student visa appointments, have also injected uncertainty into the plans of Indian students. These are not fringe groups. Indian students make up the second-largest share of foreign students in the US. They fill classroom seats in America’s top engineering schools and feed talent into its most innovative firms. To undercut this inflow is to damage America’s own human capital development.
Short-term politics, long-term damage
The political calculations behind these policies are clear. Trump's “America First” message appeals to the fears of economic displacement among blue-collar workers and middle-class professionals. This rhetoric has been supercharged by anecdotal incidents, such as the recent Florida truck crash involving an Indian-origin driver, which led to a quick decision by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to pause work visas for some foreign truckers. The narrative that foreign workers are taking jobs and compromising safety is simple but misleading.
The data tells a different story. A new report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released in March 2025, underscores the essential role of immigrants in maintaining America’s demographic and economic vitality. According to the CBO, the US is now expected to enter population decline by 2033, seven years earlier than previously forecast, unless immigration helps fill the gap. Without that demographic lift, America faces shrinking workforce participation, slower growth and heavier social welfare burdens on a diminishing base of taxpayers.
Economic growth is projected to slow to an average of 1.6% over the next 30 years, a steep drop from the 2.5% annual average of the past three decades. This is not a trajectory that can be fixed by tariffs, tax cuts or populist slogans. It requires skilled workers. And Indians, more than any other group, have been supplying them.
Not just tech: India’s critical role in American healthcare
The Indian contribution goes far beyond IT and tech services. Take healthcare, one of the most overburdened and under-resourced sectors in America today. India is the top source of immigrant doctors and the second-largest source of registered nurses in the US. Roughly, one of every five doctors is of Indian origin. The shortages in rural and underserved areas would be far more severe without Indian professionals.
Harmeet Dhillon, an Indian-American attorney and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, put this into perspective with a personal anecdote. Her father, she wrote on X recently, was the only orthopedic surgeon in a rural North Carolina farming county for over 15 years. In her social media post, she criticised those who "scapegoat" foreign-trained physicians, instead pointing to “ideological and admissions failures” in the US medical system as the root cause of shortages.
Her message underscores a vital truth, that immigrants are not just filling gaps but are sustaining entire communities.
A clock is ticking for America
The US finds itself in a race against demographic time. With birth rates falling and Baby Boomers retiring, the only viable lever to maintain economic dynamism is immigration, particularly skilled immigration. And yet, America is moving in the opposite direction, choking off pathways, politicising incidents, and painting immigrants as threats instead of assets.
The contradiction is stark: America needs Indian workers - in hospitals, in labs, in logistics and in corporate boardrooms - but its policies increasingly push them away. If current trends continue, the cost will be paid not by foreign workers, but by American households in the form of slower growth, labor shortages, and higher prices. As central bankers at Jackson Hole rightly concluded, monetary policy cannot solve what is essentially a human capital crisis. It’s time US politics caught up with economic reality. Because no matter how loudly Trump’s America might rail against foreign workers, it cannot run, let alone grow, without them. And Indians are leading that charge.
While the US was not directly cited in these comments, the warning bells may well have been rung for the world's richest economy. The central message that economic stability will depend increasingly on immigration couldn’t be more applicable to the current American trajectory under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has been steadily reshaping US immigration policy to reflect a " Hire American" ethos that is often hostile to foreign workers. In this context, India stands out because much of the ire at foreign workers in the US is directed at Indians who are seen to be snatching well-paid tech jobs from Americans. India continues to be the top source of H-1B visa recipients.
Indians in the US: Indispensable but on target
Most of the highly-skilled workers entering the US through the H-1B visa program are Indians. According to USCIS, nearly 70% of H-1B visas approved in FY 2024 were granted to Indian nationals, a staggering share that reflects India’s outsize contribution to America’s STEM ecosystem. From Silicon Valley coders to Wall Street quants, Indian professionals form the technical backbone of many of the nation’s most critical industries.
Despite this, the Trump administration continues to push for regulatory and procedural changes that disproportionately impact this very demographically. A proposed move to scrap the random H-1B lottery system and replace it with a wage-based selection would favor experienced, often already-employed, professionals at the expense of younger, early-career candidates. This directly threatens thousands of Indian graduates transitioning from US universities to the workforce, potentially cutting off a vital pipeline of future engineers, data scientists and researchers.
Other measures, such as enhanced social media vetting and the suspension of new student visa appointments, have also injected uncertainty into the plans of Indian students. These are not fringe groups. Indian students make up the second-largest share of foreign students in the US. They fill classroom seats in America’s top engineering schools and feed talent into its most innovative firms. To undercut this inflow is to damage America’s own human capital development.
Short-term politics, long-term damage
The political calculations behind these policies are clear. Trump's “America First” message appeals to the fears of economic displacement among blue-collar workers and middle-class professionals. This rhetoric has been supercharged by anecdotal incidents, such as the recent Florida truck crash involving an Indian-origin driver, which led to a quick decision by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to pause work visas for some foreign truckers. The narrative that foreign workers are taking jobs and compromising safety is simple but misleading.
The data tells a different story. A new report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released in March 2025, underscores the essential role of immigrants in maintaining America’s demographic and economic vitality. According to the CBO, the US is now expected to enter population decline by 2033, seven years earlier than previously forecast, unless immigration helps fill the gap. Without that demographic lift, America faces shrinking workforce participation, slower growth and heavier social welfare burdens on a diminishing base of taxpayers.
Economic growth is projected to slow to an average of 1.6% over the next 30 years, a steep drop from the 2.5% annual average of the past three decades. This is not a trajectory that can be fixed by tariffs, tax cuts or populist slogans. It requires skilled workers. And Indians, more than any other group, have been supplying them.
Not just tech: India’s critical role in American healthcare
The Indian contribution goes far beyond IT and tech services. Take healthcare, one of the most overburdened and under-resourced sectors in America today. India is the top source of immigrant doctors and the second-largest source of registered nurses in the US. Roughly, one of every five doctors is of Indian origin. The shortages in rural and underserved areas would be far more severe without Indian professionals.
Harmeet Dhillon, an Indian-American attorney and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, put this into perspective with a personal anecdote. Her father, she wrote on X recently, was the only orthopedic surgeon in a rural North Carolina farming county for over 15 years. In her social media post, she criticised those who "scapegoat" foreign-trained physicians, instead pointing to “ideological and admissions failures” in the US medical system as the root cause of shortages.
Her message underscores a vital truth, that immigrants are not just filling gaps but are sustaining entire communities.
A clock is ticking for America
The US finds itself in a race against demographic time. With birth rates falling and Baby Boomers retiring, the only viable lever to maintain economic dynamism is immigration, particularly skilled immigration. And yet, America is moving in the opposite direction, choking off pathways, politicising incidents, and painting immigrants as threats instead of assets.
The contradiction is stark: America needs Indian workers - in hospitals, in labs, in logistics and in corporate boardrooms - but its policies increasingly push them away. If current trends continue, the cost will be paid not by foreign workers, but by American households in the form of slower growth, labor shortages, and higher prices. As central bankers at Jackson Hole rightly concluded, monetary policy cannot solve what is essentially a human capital crisis. It’s time US politics caught up with economic reality. Because no matter how loudly Trump’s America might rail against foreign workers, it cannot run, let alone grow, without them. And Indians are leading that charge.
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