5 popular Indian-origin leaders who began their journey with H-1B visas

Along with the proposal of a $100,000 mandatory fee, the Trump administration has devised numerous other reforms to the H-1B visa programme. In a note titled ‘Reforming the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Classification Program, ’ the US Department of Homeland Security has suggested several rule changes such as revising eligibility criteria for cap exemptions, increasing scrutiny of employers with past violations and more as per a report by Newsweek. These actions by the Trump administration are being closely watched by the world as they could dramatically change the hiring practices in sectors dependent on foreign talent such as tech, healthcare, education, academia and more. In the year 2024, India received 71% of all approved H-1B visas. The largest number of these visas is awarded to Indians, followed by Chinese and other countries. Case in point are some popular and highly successful Indian-origin leaders who began their journeys with H-1B visas. Know more about them below!

When it comes to Indian-origin leaders, Satya Nadella can never be forgotten. The Microsoft CEO and chairman was born and raised in India and moved to the US in the 1990s. While he received a green card, he later chose to relinquish it to bring his wife to the States through the H-1B visa application in 1994. While the MIT Manipal-graduate has welcomed an executive order reviewing the visa for abuses during the first Trump administration, he defended the H-1B visa in the past, arguing that it had provided his company with high-skilled labor that helped it remain competitive globally.

Born in 1972, Pichai spent most of his growing years in Chennai. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he went on to study at Stanford for an MS and at Wharton for his MBA. After joining Google in 2004, he became the leading mind behind the Google Chrome browser and the Chrome OS. He became the CEO of the company in 2015 and rose to become the head of the parent company Alphabet as well. In an X post made five years ago when Trump temporarily suspended the H1-B visas, Pichai credited immigration for contributing to America's economic success, making it a global leader in tech and making Google the company it is.

While he might be a recent addition to the list, Srinivas has quickly risen to become India's youngest billionaire. The founder and CEO of Perplexity is an IIT Madras graduate whose AI search startup is now valued at $20 million. In a recent interview, the 31-year-old appreciated Silicon Valley for being welcoming to outsiders, calling it meritocratic. "The key challenge for someone coming from abroad is trust, finding credible people who will vouch for you, invest in you and mentor you, even if they might compete with you later," he said.

While Ullal, the CEO of cloud networking company Arista Networks might have been born in the United Kingdom, she was raised in India's capital. At 16, she moved to the US to attend San Francisco State University, moving on to pursue a master's degree from Santa Clara University in California. Today, at 68, she is one of the few immigrant billionaires in the United States with a net worth of $6 billion. “At Arista, we believe that the best developers can come from anywhere and there is a global distribution of engineering talent — virtual or physical,” she said in an interview with Times of India in 2023.

Current CEO and chairman of IBM, Krishna was born in Dehradun and went on to study at IIT Kanpur and earn a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After joining IBM in the 1990s, he is believed to have moved to the US on an H1-B visa. In the past, he argued that global trade goes hand in hand with allowing overseas talent to flow into the US. “We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent. And we want to develop our own talent as well, but you can’t develop it as well if you’re not bringing the best people from across the world for our people to learn from too. So we should be an international talent hub, and we should have policies that go along with that,” he said during an interview at the SXSW conference this year.