At dawn in California’s Bay Area, the river of commuters begins to flow. It is filled with the people who help make our smartphones, our favorite games, the apps we download.
But many have also come to make something else, perhaps — a new life in America.
These are just a few of the 85,000 people who come to work at American companies from as far away as India and China on H-1B visas, which are granted to highly skilled workers from overseas. Many, like Kaushik Gopal, land jobs at technology firms that have struggled to find enough American citizens with advanced math and science skills to fill their cubicles.
Often, they hope to call the United States home.
“What I have loved about the U.S. is that it didn’t matter where you came from,” Mr Gopal said. “Your past, your color or religion didn’t matter. If you did good work, there was a place for you here.”
President Trump’s plans to change the rules that govern work visas and immigration have thrown the lives of many visa holders into limbo.
“I’m always on guard because there is a chance that suddenly I’ll get the news that I’m no longer welcome,” said Mr. Gopal, 32, who first came to the United States in 2012.
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Like many of Silicon Valley’s workers who are here as part of the H-1B visa program, which is aimed at highly skilled workers, Mr. Gopal was born in India, attended university in the United States and got a job at a tech company. He said the Bay Area attracts the smartest engineers from all over the world because it is known as “a magnet for technical skill.”
He is now at the delivery start-up Instacart, working on an app that customers in several cities use to order their groceries. His weekly podcast “Fragmented,” which he hosts with an app maker named Donn Felker, has raised his professional profile and netted him speaking spots at conferences as far away as Sweden.
While growing up in India, Mr. Gopal was a fan of American television shows and cartoons. After he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, he was excited to take his parents to Disneyland.
The high-tech industry is now deeply dependent on workers like Mr. Gopal: One in eight tech workers has an H-1B visa, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs.
H-1B visa holders account for about 15 percent of the American work forces at Facebook and Qualcomm, according to the most recent documents the companies have filed with the Labor Department. Silicon Valley start-ups, which often drive tech innovation, employ many engineers on student and work visas, as do tech giants like Google and Apple.
This has allowed an ethnically diverse population to flourish around the Bay Area. The Sikh Gurdwara Sahib temple in San Jose is one of the largest Sikh temples in North America. The 49-mile stretch of towns and cities from San Jose to San Francisco is filled with Asian eateries, like the popular Rajwadi Thali restaurant in Sunnyvale.
“It’s almost like living under this — maybe not fear — but a worry about what’s next and what will happen,” Mr. Jain said. “This feeling of being unwelcome in the country. I hadn’t really felt that before.”
Courtesy NYtimes.
