Posted on 10/04/2025 3:05:34 PM PDT by marcusmaximus
For decades, the “American Dream” has inspired people from around the globe. But the reality of chasing it often turns out to be far more complicated. That struggle recently came into sharp focus after an emotional farewell video by an Indian woman went viral, resonating deeply with international students and professionals who face similar challenges.
Ananya Joshi, who completed her master’s in Biotechnology from Northwestern University in 2024, started her career in the US on an F-1 OPT visa at a biotech start-up. But when the company downsized, she lost her job. With her visa period running out and the job market tightening, she found herself racing against time to secure a new role.
Despite sending out applications, attending interviews, and networking for months, Joshi couldn’t land another opportunity. Eventually, she made the difficult choice to leave the States. In her farewell video, filmed on her journey out, she called it “by far the hardest step in this journey,” and admitted that nothing could have prepared her for the goodbye.
-snip-
But not everyone was sympathetic. Some pointed out that her video was recorded inside a business-class cabin, calling her portrayal of struggle tone-deaf. One comment read, “Left the American dream to pursue Dubai dream and weeping in a first class, such a tough life.” Another added, “Oh to cry in an Emirates business class flight to go from America to Dubai. Living the dream I see. Hope my kids will be as privileged as you are today.”
(Excerpt) Read more at indianexpress.com ...
Go love India. 🙄
Taking flack, you must be over target!
She was qualified enough to get a job at a biotech startup . Then she lost her job due to downsizing
Well, it’s technically just India.
And they have the Mumbai dream, the Chemnai dream, the Bangalore dream, the Delji, Gurgaon, Calcutta, etc dream.
This move by President Trump will be very beneficial for India. Instead of it’s best and brightest coming to the USA and building on what is great in the USA, theybwill be forced to bring the federation of India up to American standards. The chinese were forced to do that and now India must as well.
Yes. This move is good for india. 500 years ago the subcontinent was responsible for a quarter of the world’s GDP, then in 1947 at the time of its independence from the UK it was just 1.2 %. Now it is 9%.
This can only be good for India
I find it hard to believe that I align with kiryandil on this.
Marcus, stop the racial name calling. Freerepublic.com is a conservative site, not a racist one. In the 25 years I’ve been posting I see that we welcome all colours of skin as long as they are conservative.
Stop your name calling please, this only makes free republic look bad
The USA has a bad immigration system.
The bright folks have to wait a decade to get through to citizenship.
It seems the girl really loved the usa. She wrote “America was my first home as a financially independent adult and that will always be a special thing to me. Though short lived, I really appreciate the life you gave me. AMERICA, I LOVE YOU.”
But it looks like she has moved on.
I can relate somewhat, I moved out of my home town for college far away and then 6 months into my first job got a transfer to the UK and lived there for my of my 20s and loved it and still have warm feelings for it.
She seems bright and with a bright future. She will do great things for India. India is progressing well economically and this move by President Trump will help push it ou to the middle class trap. I wish her all the best back home
India has many cultures as it isn’t a country but a federation of nations with millenia of differentiation.
The Tamils, Kannadigas, Punjabis, Khasi etc have different languages, actually from different language FAMILIES (Dravidian, Indo-European Aryan, and Austro-Asiatic(related to Khmer, Vietnamese but not Thai)), different scripts, different millennia of separate history and different religions.
I find their cultures quite distinct from each other.
Your comment seems to misunderstand the U.S. immigration system and Ananya’s situation as described in the article.
Applying for citizenship isn’t an immediate option for international students like her. On an F-1 OPT visa, she was legally working post-graduation, but this visa only allows a limited period (typically 12-36 months for STEM fields) to find employment.
If a job is lost—as happened when her biotech startup downsized—she faces a tight window to secure another role before the visa expires.
Citizenship requires years of legal residency, often through employer-sponsored visas like H-1B, which are highly competitive (only 85,000 issued annually, with over 200,000 applicants in recent years).
Ananya’s story reflects the harsh realities of a system where even talented, educated individuals can face insurmountable barriers due to layoffs and visa restrictions. Calling her a “parasite” ignores her efforts—months of applications, interviews, and networking—while pursuing her career legally.
Many international students contribute significantly to the U.S., especially in fields like biotechnology, where they drive innovation. Her “American Dream” was about building a career, not exploiting the system. Let’s show some empathy for the challenges she faced rather than reducing her struggle to a unfair label.
This is good for india as these students will now be forced to build their start ups in india rather than the usa. Will it be harder? Of course it will be much, much harder. The USA has the environment and the help to easily build companies, which is why the USA leads.
But if she can pull it off in india, it will boost the indian economy and have a positive cycle effect.
This move by President Trump is good for India
Bobby, Brian, you are .correct.
India is a federation of nations not a country. Those regions, like the Gujaratis and Maharashtrians despite being neighbours have different languages with different scripts, are not mutually intelligible to each other and have over a thousand years of written works each. And different histories, religions etc. Their cuisines also differ.
And India has over 30 such different nations in that country!
My cruise schedule is on hold until my puppy dog gets 1 year old. I don’t have the heart to put a 4 month old dog in a kennel for a week.
The American Dream is for Americans. Our country does not exist to serve as a giant jobs program for India.
With every day that goes by, I realize how important my wife was in my life. But me and our 2 children are at peace knowing she no longer suffers pain and harsh side effects of chemo and radiation.
Thank you for your kind words. Greatly appreciate.
Taking the best and brightest from abroad makes sense. Of course if you are the best and brightest, a $100K fee will not deter American companies from taking you. If however you are just here to be cheap labor and to undercut American wages, that fee will be a huge barrier.
BTW, best and brightest would mean taking something more like 5 or 10 thousand per year at most. There are 750,000 H1B Indians in the US. That’s a giant theft of jobs from young Americans and a huge undercutting of American wages since they get paid 30-40% less on average than Americans for the same jobs. That’s a ridiculous sellout to corporations and a betrayal of American workers that never should have been allowed.
For the record I have nothing against Indians. My complaint is that there are too damn many of them and that they tend to only hire/promote other Indians and that they’ve gamed the corrupt H1B system which has benefitted them at the expense of American workers.
The H1B system never should have been allowed to import vast hordes of cheap labor. The 750,000 H1B Indians in the US need to go home. Now that that has been addressed, we have 418,000 people granted OPT visas to work in the US currently. That number needs to be drastically reduced.
Your posts convey that. At no point in these conversations about Indians have I seen you use slurs.
Well I think also for the best and brightest, unless they already have decades under their belt, 100k would be a deterrent for companies hiring them. The companies who can afford this would instead set up a legal entity in india and hire the person there.
The 100k would work for executives.
But perhaps a 100k deposit for 5 years, to be returned with interest to the company?
The $100K fee for an H1B visa makes sense. That only adds $33K per year in cost but that alone is going to price a lot of cheap labor out of the market which is what we want. For the really valuable people companies want, an additional $33K per year in cost is not going to deter them. If the program were only bringing the truly best and brightest, we’d be talking a few thousand per year at most.....not 750,000.
When you include the family and dependents of those it comes to 1.3 million...and the spouses were often being given work visas too....and that’s just one kind of work visa. The OPT work visas had over 400,000 additionally. The US has been flooded with cheap foreign labor for far too long and it has hurt American workers.
How does it add only 33k? I don’t know the cost for an h1-b now
Its a $100K for an H1B visa that is good for 3 years. So $100,000/3 = an additional $33,000 per year. The current H1B visa fee application runs anywhere between $1000 to $5000. So the visa application costs were extremely little and for that a company got to import a worker whom they could pay 30% to 40% less than an American and someone who could not leave their job for another because then their H1B visa would no longer be valid. That's why companies wanted ever more H1Bs and it grew to the size it is now.
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