You may have heard that poem before. Six blind men who do not know what an elephant is are sent to examine and describe one. The one who feels the tusk says that the elephant is like a spear. The one who feels the knee says it is like a tree. The one who feels the tail says it is like a snake, and so on.

“And so these men of Indostan, disputed loud and long,
each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!”

— The Blind Man and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe

The debate in India and the United States over H1B temporary work visas is a bit like the elephant being examined by many different blind men who think their perspective defines the whole situation. However, the situation is a complex boondoggle rooted partly in America’s success as a society and an economy that no one in a position of power is diagnosing correctly.

Though each is partly in the right, they all are in the wrong.

This whole debate started with what was a very minor announcement of an appointment in the incoming Trump administration. It was announced that Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American venture capitalist influencer, would be a Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. It is not a powerful post, but given the growing importance of AI in today’s world, it attracted more attention than other such appointments.

It fatefully also attracted the attention of Laura Loomer, a long-time supporter of Donald Trump – someone he takes seriously. This time, her inflammatory comments unloaded on Krishnan, who has in the past suggested getting rid of the 7% birth country cap on Green Cards that grant permanent residence as a way to attract more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics} graduates to the United States.

Trump had made immigration policy a key plank in his election campaign. Many of his ardent Make America Great Again followers support strict immigration controls. But it still came as a surprise that Loomer, a proud white supremacist with a history of anti-Indian rhetoric, decided to attack Krishnan on X, formerly Twitter.

Loomer faced pushback. First Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire and one-time Republican presidential hopeful, and then South Africa-born entrepreneur Elon Musk, both of whom are from the same general tech-finance networks as Sriram Krishnan, spoke out against Loomer. They said, in very strident terms, that H1B visas and more Indian engineers are needed for their tech businesses to flourish.

They also made disparaging comments about American culture. They insulted hardcore MAGA supporters, contending that those who opposed the H1B programme are racists. This led to the first-intra-MAGA civil war of sorts, with Indian techies squarely at the centre of the debate.

Let’s start with Vivek Ramaswamy, who thinks the problem with the US is that American parents are letting their children choose not to learn science and maths and also they have too many sleepovers.

I can’t imagine how joyless someone would have to be to think that what America needs is fewer sleepovers. Perhaps his Indian immigrant parents were extra demanding of him, which he believes has a causal link to his eventual Ivy League education and financial success. And that shaped his worldview.

The reason his views were met with revulsion in America is that culturally, Americans are not geared towards self-flagellation but towards the “pursuit of happiness” paradigm laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The pursuit of happiness is right there in the founding document or mission statement of the United States.

Explaining the path to such happiness, John Adams, the first vice president and second president said:

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

The United States has literally made this dream of John Adams true for large swathes of its population, despite undeniable inequality. As it became prosperous through the 20th century and the start of the 21st century, more and more American children grew up with the ability to pursue their happiness in whatever way they want. Not just chase the vocation that promises the most financial stability.

It is not like American society collectively does not recognise the importance of STEM education for the nation as well as financial stability at the personal level.

Over 60% of American high school graduates go on to college. The US in 2024 handed out almost twice as many STEM bachelor’s degrees as it did in 2000. A lot of the prom kings and queens who Ramaswamy derided in his tweet join engineering programmes, as hard as it might be for Ramaswamy to believe. MIT Professor of Mathematics John Urschel, for instance, also played in the National Football League.

It is a myth that American students are not as good at maths and science as Indian and Chinese students. Those who choose those paths are very good at it. Engineers in the US generally have a very high employment rate. So it is not that America is not creating enough engineers, but rather that it quite simply needs more engineers than it can create even with its best efforts.

America in general has a labour shortage. At 4.2%, its unemployment rate is at near-historic lows, as well as lower than most other industrial economies. This labour shortage is pervasive – from the low end of the skill scale to the high end, however you define skill. Musk and Ramaswamy define skill as writing code. A Chesapeake Bay fishing business might define swift removal and packing of crab meat as skill.

Being the hub and indeed the birthplace of the information technology revolution meant that America was able to place a higher financial value on code writing skills than the crab cleaning skills. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Tesla and other firms needed a lot more engineers and coders than America was producing or realistically could produce.

As big, rich, and populated as America was and as huge and impressive as its university system was, the explosion of information technology in the 1990s created a demand for white-collar labour never seen before in American history. Until relatively recently, immigration to the US was almost exclusively of the blue-collar variety. But now, America needed college graduates.

This supply deficit was fulfilled by the only two countries on the planet that have more people than America. India and China ended the 20th century by shaking off their self-imposed economic shackles and chasing high economic growth as the means to ending widespread poverty.

Both China and India invested a lot more in engineering and affiliated education as they transformed their agrarian economies. This created a fresh reliable supply of college graduates educated enough to fulfill the labour deficit in the US tech sector. And the H1B system was created.

Indians have a huge blind spot about the H1B visa: they forget it is explicitly a temporary worker visa. However, it has become the de facto feeder pipeline for employment-based Green Cards that grant permanent US residence and eventual citizenship. It is a flaw in the US immigration system that Indians do not recognise as a flaw. Or in a larger sense, as a loophole.

Thus Indians get very offended when someone attacks the H1B system as a scam, often in racist terms like Laura Loomer did. But Indians do not realise that there is an undeniable kernel of truth in those criticisms, past the obvious racism and white supremacy.

The H1B system is not meant as a Green Card feeder system, but has been turned into that, due to the high demands for labour in the lucrative tech industry.

What happens is that over 70% of the H1B visas every year go to Indian engineer immigrants, including those who have got Masters degrees in the US. Being a temporary worker visa in theory, the H1B programme has no country caps. Theoretically, 100% of the H1B visa allotments could go to Indians.

But Green Cards have a country cap. In any given year, no more than 7% of Green Cards can be given to people from the same birth country. This is a core feature of American immigration law that is unlikely to change, no matter how much Indians complain about it. This is because both parties in the US, the Republicans and Democrats, support the country cap.

The problem is not racism or an elaborate scam. It is simple arithmetic.

Because of the 7% country cap, no more than 70,000 people born in India can get a Green Card in a year. But America issues at least 85,000 H1B visas, in addition to visas under other related programmes. Let’s put the total number at 100,000. Of those, 70% are Indian. So that’s 70,000 people.

But each of these has a partner who is often a dependent and an average of two children. So the US is basically giving almost 300,000 Indians entry into the de facto first stage of the Green Card process through the H1B system.

Tens of thousands of Indians also arrive on student visas, family visas and other pathways. They also join the Green Card queue. This means is that the Green Card queue for Indians keeps getting longer with each passing year.

As a result, there are a few million Indians, and growing, in the Green Card queue. This is the bigger picture of the elephant that everyone in this debate is missing.

The path forward is unclear because key powerful people in the US at this stage are unclear about it too.

It is undeniable that millions of Indians are stuck in this Green Card limbo and millions more will join that queue while complaining. Sure, you are stuck in that queue with an Employment Authorization Document for years and years, but at least you’re legally in the country you wanted to move to and are gainfully employed. So Indians will keep joining the queue.

It seems inevitable that at some point, some American president working with the US Congress will have to pass a one-time Green Card queue clearing bill because millions of Indian (and Chinese and Mexican) families need relief. And then they will put country quotas on H1B visas too.

For now, the Silicon Valley tech industry braces itself for the fallout of their Faustian bargain with the Immigration Hawk MAGA movement.

Gaurav Sabnis is an Associate Professor at the School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken New Jersey. He is a naturalised citizen of the United States, via marriage, and lives in New York City.