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Paridhi Upadhaya was packing her bags after securing a computer science scholarship in the US until headlines of President Donald Trump's H-1B visa crackdown last week prompted her family in Lucknow to scrap the plan. "Trump's unending onslaught against immigrants is forcing us to consider other destinations for her," the 18-year-old's father, Rudar Pratap said. Upadhaya is among thousands of Indians for whom the American dream of world-class education, lucrative careers, better quality of life and social mobility, is turning sour due to rising U.S. visa restrictions and policy unpredictability. For decades, the H-1B visa has been the gateway to...

In India, some of the biggest jobs in tech come to you. Graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT), one of the country’s most prestigious universities, are recruited directly by Indian companies as well as American firms looking to lock down some of the world’s top talent in fields that will dominate the future, such as artificial intelligence and robotics. Many of them also continue their studies in the United States, where India overtook China last year as the biggest source of foreign students. But policy decisions and other moves by the Trump administration, including the recently announced $100,000...

The H-1B visa, introduced by the United States in 1990, has long been a pathway for highly skilled professionals from across the globe to contribute to America’s technology sector. Many of today’s tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella, entered the US through this programme, allowing them to innovate, lead companies, and create global impact. -snip- Sundar Pichai Pichai came to the US as an international student before transitioning to an H-1B visa, which allowed him to join Google in product management roles. Over the years, he rose to become CEO of Alphabet, overseeing key innovations in...

The H-1B visa has helped skilled professionals from across the world to advance America's technology sector. Three stalwarts who have made an indelible mark in the US after obtaining an H-1B visa are - Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella. For many Indians, it has symbolised the realisation of the "American Dream", however, on September 21, US President Donald Trump imposed a new $100,000 fee on this visa, pushing it into major controversy. -snip- Satya Nadella Microsoft's chief executive officer had started his career in the 1990s under the H-1B visa program. He has highlighted the program's importance for...

A Reddit post by an Indian professional who recently returned from the United States has reignited debate on the H1B visa system, workplace culture, and community-based favoritism in American tech firms. The techie, who previously worked at Amazon USA, said one of the key reasons for returning to India was the “toxic behaviour” of Indian managers abroad. According to him, many Indian managers exploit employees on visas, aware of their vulnerability due to complex immigration rules. “They avoid hiring Americans because they know they can’t push them to work 24/7. Americans won’t hesitate to sue if boundaries are crossed,” the...

A Texas housing developer was forced to deny that a new community being built in the Dallas area will be exclusively for people from India. Sankalp Developer became infamous for the now-viral tweet that claimed they were building 'a development by INDIANS for the right INDIANS.' The tweet reads: 'INDIA FIRST!' The post does not specify where the supposed development would be located, however, Sanklap is based in Frisco - a wealthy suburb of Dallas. In recent years, Frisco and neighboring communities like Plano, Prosper and Celina have been flooded by Southeast Asians, in what used to be majority white...

On coming to know of their daughter being in love with a Dalit boy, her parents had admonished her and told her to end the relationship.In a case of suspected “honour” killing in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, a 19-year-old Dalit youth was murdered on Sunday, 23 July, by the relatives of an upper-caste Hindu girl with whom he was in a relationship. The youth was identified as Muttiah, a resident of Swamidas Nagar in the Appuvilai village near Thisayanvilai in Tirunelveli district. According to the police, Muttiah was working in the wedding-card-manufacturing industry and fell in love with...

HYDERABAD: Former Chief Justice of India, Justice NV Ramana, expressed concern over the deep-rooted caste system within the Indian community in the United States. He said this while appealing to the Telugu diaspora to continue its campaign for conferring Bharat Ratna on the late minister NT Rama Rao, former chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Addressing an event at the Pennsylvania Convention Centre in Philadelphia on Sunday, Justice Ramana said: "When caste differences have blurred in India, particularly in the southern part of the country, it's a matter of grave concern that caste system is prevalent among Indians in the...

India's caste system is among the world's oldest forms of surviving social stratification. The BBC explains its complexities. The system which divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindi word for religion, but here it means duty) is generally accepted to be more than 3,000 years old. How did caste come about? Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society"....

A raft of evidence shows that caste discrimination has been imported from India to the United States. Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence, including Vice President...

FILE – New Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks during an inauguration ceremony for city officials Monday, Jan. 6, 2014, in Seattle. One of Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather – a man she “otherwise loved very much” – utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid. Now an elected official in a city thousands of miles from India, she has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws.

America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system, with Apple (AAPL.O) emerging as an early leader in policies to rid Silicon Valley of a rigid hierarchy that's segregated Indians for generations. … …U.S. discrimination laws…do not explicitly ban casteism. … …the first U.S. employment lawsuit [filed by California] about alleged casteism - has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians' social position has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin "priestly" class to the Dalits, shunned as "untouchables" and consigned to menial labor. … Since the suit was filed,...

What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner? It's feudalism. This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy. (From time to time, extraordinarily pretty peasant girls might be married off to a lesser lord.) The rise...

Until recently, the Hindu caste system was not an issue in the United States. Now, as a result of mass immigration from South Asia, this cultural hierarchy has been imported into our country and we have to deal with it. In 1916, B.R. Ambedkar, the father of India’s constitution and himself a Dalit, wrote: “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.” Now, it's happening.

WATERVILLE, Maine (AP) — Colby College is banning discrimination based on caste, a system of inherited social class, becoming one of the nation’s earliest colleges to do so. The private liberal arts college revised its nondiscrimination policy to add caste to its list of protections for the campus community. The efforts were led by a professor who took an interest in caste discrimination across the country and realized the college needed to recognize it as a form of discrimination, the Bangor Daily News reported. “You have to first name what it is to say: This exists, we name it, we...

... America traditionally has not had a caste system. Until now. We can see emerging, right here in America, a sharp divide between progressive elites and ordinary citizens. This divide can be seen in multiple areas. Progressive elites have high walls protecting their homes, even as they declare that “walls don’t work.” They have private security, even as they insist Americans don’t need guns to protect themselves. They somehow elude accountability even when they break the same laws that get ordinary citizens into major trouble.

Two decades before he landed in Australia, Captain James Cook was at sea facing a desperate matter of life and death. The problem was scurvy, a deadly illness caused by Vitamin C deficiency and which had been the curse of sailors for centuries. By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific in 1769 he had grown confident in a remedy, the only problem being that it was sauerkraut – never a particularly popular meal in England, and at a time when vegetables were looked down upon. How to convince the crew to eat 7,860 lbs of...

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.” Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by white and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another...

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.” Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by White and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another...

. “If you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are,” proclaims sports commentator Jemele Hill (pictured above), citing Caste, a “masterpiece” of a book by Isabel Wilkerson. Quickly challenged, Hill pushed back that Nazi Germany “learned their systems of genocide by watching America,” and the Nazis “borrowed significantly from American racial laws,” which is why “some Nazi scholars were in America studying racial terror in the South.” A somewhat different perspective might emerge from a black person who actually lived in Nazi Germany and the United States. Consider,...