Vance's H-1B crusade leads to family history scrutiny

TOI Correspondent from Washington: “His in-laws were indentured servants and his wife is an anchor baby.” That was one of the barbs ricocheting around social media after US vice president JD Vance accused microsoft of replacing american workers with "foreign indentured servants" - shortly before his boss honored the company’s India-born CEO, Satya Nadella, at the white house.Vance may have intended to put Silicon Valley in the dock with what was perceived as a slut that invited a withering response from New Delhi. Instead, he opened several lines of fire at once with his use of a colonial-era term - from Indian professionals, who regard H-1B visas as a route to opportunity rather than servitude; from tech giants, who credit immigrants with building some of America’s most valuable businesses; and from social-media users delighted to discover an immigration controversy in the vice-president’s own family, one highlighted by a rabid section of the MAGA base.The reference to Vance’s in-laws was pointed, if imprecise. His wife, Usha Vance, was born in California in 1986 to Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, immigrants from Andhra Pradesh. The family settled in the San Diego area, where her father pursued an engineering career and her mother became a molecular biologist. Usha Chilukuri went on to Yale, a school founded with donation from a notorious Bostonian, Elihu Yale, who pillaged India as the governor general of Madras; she met JD Vance at Yale law school.In other words, the family’s publicly documented story is one of immigration, higher education and professional achievement. There is no established evidence that her parents were “indentured labourers” since their coming to America predated the H1-B program that began in 1990, but their route to US residency was not very different - from academia to employment. Calling Usha an “anchor baby” is equally misleading; she was born in California and is a US citizen by birth under the constitutional rule generally applicable to people born on American soil.Meanwhile, Microsoft’s response directly challenges the impression that its H-1B figures represent thousands of new foreign hires. Of approximately 6,000 H-1B applications it filed in the last fiscal year, the company said, 80% were extensions or changes of status for existing employees. These were not applications to bring in new workers. The remaining filings concerned people already legally present in the US, who chose to work for Microsoft; the company said these employees amounted to about 1% of its US workforce.Microsoft also said it pays H-1B employees the same as other employees doing comparable work, and that its wages rank among the highest in the technology sector. While the figures do not establish that microsoft never displaces American workers, or that every H-1B employer complies with the law, they do challenge the simple Vance arithmetic in which 6,000 layoffs plus 6,000 visa applications automatically equal 6,000 replacements of American workers deserving "American jobs."There is another inconvenient detail for Vance’s argument; Nadella himself immigrated from India and built his career in the US, going on to become microsoft’s CEO - only the third after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer - in 2014 after joining the company in 1992. While career is hardly proof that every visa holder is indispensable, it is a reminder that the immigrant talent pool Vance is attacking has also helped produce the very American corporate success he wants to defend. Microsoft has grown more than 12x (market cap growing from $ 300 billion to almost $ 4 trillion) in the time Nadella has helmed the company and many American retirement accounts have grown on the ballast provided by such tech giants.Among the most pointed responses to Vance’s slight came from Shobhit Mathur, Co-founder and Vice chancellor of Rishihood university and IIT alum. Recalling his early days at Amazon in an H-1B role, Mathur wrote on X that he was part of the initial team that built Amazon Web Services (AWS), which he described as now contributing more than 60% of Amazon’s profits. His post’s central argument was simple: around a hundred H-1B holders were part of that early team, and the company’s subsequent transformation would have looked very different without them. “Good luck building companies and wealth without these ‘indentured servants’,” he scoffed.The timing of Vance’s broadside has prompted another question: why is the administration escalating its campaign now, rather than earlier in Trump’s term, or for that matter, during his first term? The answer may be a mixture of policy and politics. The administration has already taken steps to tighten the H-1B program, which even some of its supporters say had been gamed by some operators, and the latest action gives Vance an opportunity to demonstrate that the crackdown is reaching powerful corporations, not just migrants at the bottom of the labour market. Naming Microsoft and suspending its access to a green-card process creates a visible target, although Vance and co have conspicuously let amazon, which processes more H1Bs than Microsoft, off the hook.The final twist of irony came in the wee hours of Friday even as Vance’s gibe about “indentured servants” echoed across the world, where several nations are led by descendants of immigrant laborers. The Nobel committee awarded the 2026 peace prize to Navi Pillay, the South African jurist of Indian Tamil descent, snubbing a non-indentured leader, who has literally been begging for it.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.