Seattle was a surprise to Shweta Singhal, 39, when she relocated with her husband and daughter from New Delhi in 2016.

She expected gloomy weather and distant residents. But she fell in love with the mild seasons and kind people she encountered. Eventually, she and her husband had another child, a son born in the U.S., and bought a home in the suburb of Kirkland, Washington.

“Slowly, with time, we’re realizing that this is where we want to live the rest of our lives,” Singhal said.

But that future is far from certain. Singhal’s husband holds a skilled worker visa, an H-1B visa. His employer is the visa sponsor, so the family’s life in the Seattle area depends on his continued employment. His employer has also sponsored them for green cards, which would give them permanent status in the U.S. But wait times for them might stretch 15 more years or longer.

“At any point of time in the worst circumstances, if my husband loses his job and we have to go back to India,” Singhal said, their lives would be turned around.

Theirs is a common story in the Seattle area and beyond. The H-1B program enables people from across the world to move to the U.S., with the potential to become permanent residents. But long waits for green cards mean that many live in effective limbo for years.

For over a decade, the program has drawn criticism for being bureaucratic and time-consuming. But now, its future has become especially uncertain with a new presidential administration and rising negative sentiment toward immigrants.

President Donald Trump has expressed conflicting positions on H-1B visas over the years. In 2020, he suspended the issuance of new H-1B worker visas; in an executive order, he wrote that the move would protect American workers during the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But earlier this year, he praised the program as “great” and referred to himself as a “believer in H-1B.”

Among Trump’s backers, fault lines emerged between those who believe it displaces American workers and those who see it as critical to powering the country’s tech sector, including Elon Musk, whose companies hire workers through the program.

Amid this political precarity, people living in the Seattle area on H-1B status are reflecting on the future of the program — and their own.

Low chances, high stakes

The H-1B program was established by Congress in 1990 as a pathway for skilled workers to live and work in the U.S. Sponsoring employers have to demonstrate difficulty filling jobs and must pay above-market wages — hoops theoretically designed to disincentivize them from hiring foreign workers for less money than American citizens would be paid.

H-1B visas allow holders to enter the U.S. and live and work in the country for up to six years. While H-1B status is temporary, employers can sponsor their H-1B workers for permanent residency. Workers can stay past the six-year limit if they are waiting on green card processing. Workers can also switch jobs as long as they can find another employer to continue sponsoring them.

The Seattle-area economy has been undeniably shaped by the H-1B program. Over the past 15 years, thousands of employers in Washington have petitioned to hire H-1B workers, with Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile and Expedia among the program’s top employers.

For workers, getting an H-1B visa can be life-changing.

Faisal Khan, 35, moved to the U.S. from Islamabad, Pakistan, as a graduate student in 2014. Five years later, he got an H-1B visa, opening a door to his long-held dream of living and working in the U.S.

He was drawn to the country for a plethora of reasons, said Khan, who now lives in Seattle. “Better job opportunities, better quality of life, the ability to do whatever you dream of really, the flexibility, the freedom.”

It’s a sentiment shared by many people — that the program put them on a coveted path to building their lives in a new country. But that doesn’t come without its costs. Even getting an H-1B visa is a gamble.

Because there are usually far more prospective workers than visas available, each year U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services uses a lottery to select people for the program.

Some, like Khan, are lucky enough to get a visa on their first go. Those who don’t get picked find their immediate futures shadowed by uncertainty.

Alex L., 25, entered the H-1B lottery for the first time in 2023. A robotics engineer from Shanghai, he was confident about his chances and crestfallen when he wasn’t selected. The second time around, he was still hopeful, but he tempered his expectations. Again, he wasn’t picked. “Now I know the odds are very minuscule,” he said. Alex requested that his last name be withheld to protect his job.

He felt crushed by the realization that mere luck of the draw stood between himself and everything he’d nurtured over his adult years: friendships, hobbies, colleagues, his girlfriend, his job and even his belongings. “I’ve got a life here, and I might have to lose it.”

As a recent college graduate with a STEM degree, Alex got three years of work authorization as part of his student visa. But that ends this year. He recently applied to enter the H-1B visa lottery a third and final time. He’ll learn whether he’s been selected by April 1, but he isn’t sure he wants it anymore.

In January, he got accepted into a robotics graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University. Rather than work, he’s planning to pursue his passions through academia instead.

Participants describe life in a “golden cage”

Those who manage to secure an H-1B visa can begin striving toward a future for which they’ve long aspired.

In 2012, Bharath M., 38, relocated from Chennai, India, to Phoenix. He’d been working for a U.S. company, and it sponsored him for an H-1B visa, which he got. Bharath requested to withhold his last name, citing concerns due to the current sensitivities about immigration.

What followed was a period of successive milestones. In the U.S., he found himself immersed in a completely new culture. Life was defined by excitement; he celebrated Thanksgiving, shopped Black Friday deals and watched Christmas movies, all for the first time. He moved to Seattle with his wife and son in 2021.

Eight years ago, Bharath was sponsored for an employment-based green card. But he expects a long, winding path ahead.

Immigration law limits the number of green cards that can be allocated annually to recipients based on country of birth. Because people born in India constitute a significant proportion of prospective green card applicants, they face the longest wait times to gain permanent status. (People born in mainland China, the Philippines and Mexico also contend with lengthy wait times, though not to the same extent.)

As a result of these delays, H-1B workers describe putting off major life decisions including buying homes, starting businesses, caring for aging parents and traveling because of the limitations of their status.

Bharath estimates that it will be a decade or two before he can get a green card based on current processing speeds for people born in India.

“It makes me feel very uncertain and unstable,” he said.

Arun, 36, moved to the U.S. 12 years ago to get his master’s degree. Today, he works for a California-based tech company as a senior engineer on H-1B status, and lives in Seattle with his wife and their two children, who were both born in the U.S. Arun requested his last name be withheld out of concern for his employment.

Like Bharath, he expects to wait a decade or longer before he’ll be eligible to get a green card. Exacerbating his stress is an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment across the political spectrum.

Arun was disheartened by Trump’s executive order canceling birthright citizenship, signed in January and currently blocked by federal judges. He found the move exclusionary. The executive order was aimed at “preserving the meaning and value of American citizenship.” The implication that his children were spoiling that value was discouraging to Arun.

He was also disappointed when Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in January characterized the H-1B program as “disastrous for American workers.”

Arun had always admired Sanders’ pro-worker orientation. But Sanders’ comments felt like an echo of the anti-Indian scapegoating he was increasingly encountering online.

Critics of the H-1B program argue that it takes jobs away from American workers and depresses wages in the tech sector. But researchers say that the impact of the program on the U.S. economy is not so straightforward. H-1B workers don’t necessarily displace American ones, said Madeline Zavodny, a professor of economics at the University of North Florida.

“The program’s time-consuming to use, it’s expensive to use,” she said. “It’s in many ways a last resort.”

Zavodny also pointed out that every H-1B worker hired stimulates more jobs within an economy, such as Seattle. Without the program, companies would likely offshore those jobs to other regions, including Canada and India — a process that is already ongoing because of the limited nature of the H-1B program.

Economists also point out that the program has effects beyond the labor market.

“The tech sector has been the highest innovation sector in the country for a long time,” said Gaurav Khanna, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. “As consumers, our lives have changed in many ways because of all this technological innovation.” If the tech industry continues to offshore, the U.S. will continue to lose that economic production and innovation.

Life after the H-1B program

Those who ultimately move from H-1B status into permanent residency describe the transition as liberating.

Emilia Liu, a 34-year-old immigration attorney originally from Kunming, China, lived in Seattle for a decade before she became a green card holder. She recounts the stress in that time of navigating the immigration system at work and at home.

Liu initially moved to the city on a student visa. After getting her law degree from Seattle University, she entered the H-1B visa lottery. She was selected, but how life might have unfolded instead always exists in her mind.

“The theme is just anxiety,” she said. “Your life could go a totally different way depending on just how the lottery was run.” She has friends who weren’t picked, and they had to leave. After five years on H-1B status, her then-employer began sponsoring her for a green card, though she ended up pursuing permanent residency through marriage to her longtime American partner instead.

Like those of many other people, Liu’s feelings about immigrating are as complicated as the journey itself. “I feel the privilege every day being an immigrant in this country, but also being able to practice law,” she said. “It’s a big privilege that I don’t forget.”

It remains to be seen how the second Trump administration will approach the future of the H-1B program. While the executive branch has levers to ease or tighten the process, any major overhaul would have to go through Congress — an unlikely prospect given that even bipartisan immigration reform bills have stalled over the past decade.

That means uncertainty is likely to continue weighing on those who are seeking H-1B status, as well as those who already have it but face long waits for permanent residency.

“It does have an impact on people’s mental health,” Liu said. “Feeling constantly stressed is never good.

“Outside the work visa category, you’re still a person.”

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