Mahesh Babu Munjala, a native of India who works with data and AI at a biopharmaceutical company in Florida, felt lucky to win the highly-coveted H-1B visa lottery in 2017. It was his third try to get the skilled worker permit after his student visa expired shortly after graduating with a Master’s in computer science.
Only 30% to 40% of employer-sponsored applicants typically succeed each year in getting H-1Bs, which last up to six years and are issued to only 85,000 people annually. In 2024, the approval rate was even lower: 26%.
But for Munjala, obtaining the H-1B was the least of the hurdles he still must jump through in an effort to remain in the U.S. long-term. As it turns out, being an AI leader at a company that’s a healthcare trailblazer and in an industry in dire need of top AI talent, only carries so much weight.
In August 2024, Munjala applied for another of what is an alphabet soup of visas: A permanent residency card for people with extraordinary abilities known as the EB-1A—nicknamed the Einstein Visa— that lets holders bypass the regular green card queue that has a much longer wait. However, in December, his application was denied.
Since Munjala is among the few experts in data analytics for rare diseases and blood plasma, and had also reviewed others’ research papers in top journals, he was surprised and disappointed by the rejection. If his expertise and impact doesn’t meet the bar, what does?
“I led projects that impacted millions of people who take flu vaccines, plasma therapies and gene therapy product releases to market,” Munjala said.
Now he’s in limbo. He extended his temporary visa, sponsored by his employer, CSL, and plans to reapply for the Einstein Visa. However, due to quotas for Indian applicants and a backlog for those applicants stretching several decades, Munjala has little hope of getting a green card for permanent residency even though his employer is trying to help.
In the meantime, he’s anxious about his future and, though he considers his job secure, must live with a certain uneasiness about what would happen if he’s ever laid off. If jobless, he would only have 60 days to find a new position at a company that’s willing to take over sponsorship of his H-1B. Otherwise, he’d have to leave the country.
“Sometimes it’s all too much to keep in mind and work at the same time,” Munjala said.
The U.S. has long relied on immigrant talent to drive innovation, especially in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence. More than half of PhD holders working as computer and mathematical scientists and engineers are foreign born, according to a study in 2021 by the National Science Foundation.
Immigrants also have an outsized role in creating tech startups, the most successful of which play a major role in the nation’s economy. For example, 65% of the top U.S.-based AI companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants, according to a 2023 report by the National Foundation for American Policy.
But outdated visa policies, massive backlogs of visa applications, and political uncertainty have heightened fears among the very workers fueling the U.S. AI boom. Despite their contributions, many AI specialists—even top talent at Google, Nvidia, Meta, OpenAI, and Walmart—find themselves trapped in a byzantine immigration system full of red tape, country-based quotas, and bureaucrats who struggle to grasp the fast-changing AI landscape.
The challenges come at every level of their immigration process. Many workers in AI fields first come to the U.S. to attend top universities, including Harvard and Stanford, on student visas. After that, many who want to start their own companies can’t because they are restricted by the rules of their student visas and work permits that let them get temporary jobs for training in their field of study. If they are ultimately lucky enough to get sponsored by an employer and selected in the H-1B lottery, they have six years to figure out another way to stay. And country quotas—a limit on the number of visas awarded based on an applicant’s nation of origin—mean it can still take years, or even decades, to then get a coveted green card.
Donald Trump, newly sworn in as president on Monday, could complicate matters even more for certain skilled immigrants seeking both temporary and permanent visas—or make it easier for them. His policy isn’t entirely clear. As a candidate, Trump promised to crack down on immigration to help U.S. citizens get jobs. But since his election victory, he publicly sided with his new best friend, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, on making more visas available for skilled immigrants to help accelerate tech development for companies across the country.
It’s the same Trump, who, just days into his first presidential term, unexpectedly issued an executive order blocking the immigration of people born in seven predominantly Muslim nations. The decision led to visas for up to 60,000 people being provisionally revoked, sowing chaos at U.S. airports when impacted immigrants suddenly discovered that they no longer had permission to enter the country.
Near the end of his first term, Trump also went so far as to order the federal government to suspend issuing any new work visas, including H-1Bs. The order, vociferously opposed by many companies that rely on skilled foreign labor, was eventually rejected after being challenged in court.
Whatever Trump ultimately decides to do this time around, if anything, could have a huge impact on the U.S. economy for years to come and on the lives of skilled immigrants trying to navigate the visa process. Already frustrated and confused, many fear that it could get even worse over the next four years.
“We should not need to jump through this many hoops just to get a highly qualified person a green card,” said Amber Davis, a Boston-based immigration lawyer.
As it is, many skilled immigrants give up because of the convoluted visa process or are forced to leave. Davis gave the example of one client, an AI engineering leader who has worked at several Fortune 500 companies. The individual had to leave the U.S. because they maxed out on their H-1B visa renewals and their application for a permanent visa was denied. “It’s very arbitrary,” said Davis, who added that her client, with few options to return, has had to remain outside the U.S. for over a year.
Even some well-known AI leaders have been affected. For example, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI—a startup valued at $9 billion that is among Silicon Valley’s buzziest—posted on X in October that he has been waiting for a decision about his Einstein Visa application for over three years. On paper, at least, he has a long track record at many of the most successful companies in tech. Srinivas has a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, was an intern at OpenAI in the company’s early days and then worked at Google’s AI division, DeepMind, before founding Perplexity. But his visa application is on hold due to quotas based on his country of birth, India.
In a post on X last month, Srinivas vented about the process: “I think I should get a green card. Wdyt?,” short for ‘what do you think?’ In response, Musk, who has posted on X about Silicon Valley’s “shortage of excellent engineering talent,” and will co-lead the new DOGE advisory body for cutting government spending under President Trump, gave his full-throated support.
A clogged system, filled with risks and bureaucracy
In advance of Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services was deluged with new applications for permanent visas. The result has been additional delays on a process that had already been bogged down over the past year due to staffing shortages within the federal government compounded by already-existing backlogs. “There is a sense of panic, even among a lot of the top AI talent, especially newer talent,” Davis explained.
The reality is that there are relatively few merit-based pathways for top immigrant AI talent to get U.S. work visas. Most green cards issued each year are granted based on family ties to people who are already legally in the U.S. In contrast, only about 14% of green cards, or 140,000, are allocated for employment-based applicants, most of whom need an existing job offer to qualify.
Of those, the only truly merit-based permanent visas leading to a green card—the several categories of what’s known as the EB-1—are capped at approximately 40,000 annually.
In addition to these visas, which include the Einstein Visa, there is the highly-competitive O-1 visa, that is also for those with extraordinary ability. The O-1 visa, however, like the H-1B, is temporary—though it can be renewed every three years indefinitely. But it comes with risks.
Sarah Allali, a French national, recently secured an O-1 visa to work on her early-stage AI startup, Floode. But because her visa was granted based on her startup’s funding, its success isn’t just a business concern—it’s a legal one. If the company fails and she’s forced to shut it down, her visa could be invalid. “My visa is tied to my company,” Allali said. “I would have to leave the country.”
Some immigrant AI talent is therefore reluctant to found startups, said Deedy Das, a principal at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures from India who co-founded hot AI startup Glean. He joined Facebook after college and then switched to Google shortly after. “I may not have even done those things if not for the risks of immigration, because in my mind, it was ‘Hey, a big company is safest—why take the risk of going to a startup?’” said Das, who holds an Einstein Visa.
Meanwhile, bureaucratic blunders prompt questions about the fairness of who does and doesn’t receive visas. Yuchen Jin, a China-native who is cofounder and chief technology officer of AI startup Hyperbolic Labs, was surprised to learn that the federal government rejected his green card application, inexplicably citing a lack of sufficient impact “beyond that of Apple, Inc.” He was also mistakenly identified in the decision as Apple’s chief technology officer.
“I have never worked at Apple,” Jin wrote on X. “I got my [computer science] PhD, cofounded an AI startup, and raised $20M. Yet, after waiting an entire year, I’m rejected with this absurd reasoning. High-skilled immigrants are America’s secret weapon. It should be merit-based — not left to some USCIS officer carelessly reviewing documents and copy-pasting rejection reasons!”
Last week, the Biden Administration released what it called an AI Talent Report acknowledging that immigration obstacles often prevent capable workers—including many immigrant U.S. university graduates—from staying in the country. The report, in particular, noted the impediments for people with AI expertise. “Among non-U.S. citizen AI PhDs who left the United States, over half cited immigration issues as relevant to their decision to leave,” the report said.
The barriers appear to be higher in the U.S. than in many other countries. Sixty percent of non-U.S. citizens with U.S. PhDs related to AI report immigration difficulties, while only 12% of non-citizen AI PhDs in other countries mentioned similar issues. “Targeted immigration reform measures could help increase the supply of top talent in the United States,” the report said.
A new era for the Trump administration
For now, many immigrants are worried about what Trump wants to do about visas for skilled workers. While some are hopeful that Musk and other tech executives close to the administration will lobby for more visas for immigrant AI talent, the Trump transition team hasn’t shared any details about its plans. “They’ve just provided blanket statements that have caused ripples of fear,” said Poonam Gupta, a New York-based immigration lawyer who advises Big Tech clients.
Even if Trump keeps the status quo for skilled visa applicants, rather than adding the administrative hurdles that characterized his first term, legal immigration may slow considerably, she explained. “There are just so many unknowns that it’s really hard for our clients to keep calm.” Gupta said.
One concern is that Trump will reverse recent attempts to make certain permanent visas easier and faster to obtain for AI professionals, in particular. One such attempt was a Biden executive order in 2023 that sought to streamline the process for skilled immigrants with expertise in certain critical areas to study, stay, and work in the U.S.
Priyanka Kulkarni, founder and CEO of Casium, a startup that tries to give personalized guidance to immigrant work visa applicants and make filling out the paperwork faster is familiar with difficulties of getting a work visa. After a decade at Microsoft developing AI, she was offered a spot at an AI-focused startup incubator in Seattle, but was hindered from accepting due to visa problems. She held a H-1B visa, yet required the permanent Einstein Visa because of the difficulty at the time of starting a company under the H-1B rules (Biden’s changes to those rules last week make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to start companies).
For Kulkarni, just preparing the application for the Einstein Visa took several months and legal assistance that cost $10,000. Such sky-high attorney fees are a major hurdle for many applicants. “There was always this uncertainty in the back of my head,” Kulkarni said. “I wanted to start a company, I wanted to innovate, I have so much deep expertise in AI. But there were so many hurdles, even in terms of just knowing my options.”
A fast-changing AI industry
A major challenge with current U.S. immigration policies is that they don’t align well with how AI talent operates. For example, merit-based visas often require researchers and engineers to cite published work or patents as evidence of their expertise. While this is straightforward for academics, AI professionals at today’s top tech companies and labs frequently work on proprietary projects, preventing them from publicly sharing their contributions.
That means even a high-paid Google vice president may have to come up with other ways to make their value clear. “The fact they got to Google, it doesn’t cut it anymore,” said Gupta. “You still have to prove you’re at the very top, that you’re special.”
One Amazon AI product leader from India who holds a Master’s degree, and who works at the company’s cloud computing division AWS, said U.S. immigration officials typically evaluate AI workers seeking merit-based visas from a research, not a business, perspective. Doing so puts an important layer of AI workers—those focused more on the business side—at a huge disadvantage. “They have a certain way, like we need people to have scientific and research papers, and only then will we give them an EB-1A,” said the product leader, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize his H-1B status. “If a business person like me comes in and says, ‘I’m so critical for business,’ they will probably reject me.”
Many top AI workers therefore spend their evenings and weekends on “profile building”—judging at hackathons, speaking at conferences, landing media coverage—to pad their resumes to meet the stringent eligibility criteria for the most competitive merit-based visas. Even employees who are key product leaders working on a flagship AI product must still show proof that they are well-known in their fields for their work.
The Amazon employee still has three years left on his H-1B visa, but his wife only has two. Normally, H-1B visa holders can have their company apply on their behalf for another temporary visa that extends their stay until they can apply for a green card.
But because of legal restrictions, companies that have had recent layoffs, as Amazon has, often must pause petitions for H-1B or other employer-sponsored visas in occupations affected by the job cuts. Those employers are required to show that hiring foreign workers won’t hurt the job opportunities of U.S. workers. “So that’s another whole level of anxiety and complexity,” the Amazon employee said about his own future.
The uncertainty, he added, affects simple things that others may not even think about— whether to contribute to a 401k, buy a house, or even buy large appliances, with the knowledge that one might have to leave the country. “It impacts your basic personal finance 101,” he said.
A long, uncertain immigration journey for AI workers
For those AI workers who have gotten to the other side of the immigration mountain, there is relief—and sometimes a desire to help others get to the finish line. Rudra Chowdhury, a Seattle-based technical product manager from India who develops AI products at streaming company Tubi, worked doggedly for years to build his “profile” with the goal of getting his Einstein Visa and then his green card, skipping the H-1B lottery altogether. Last year, he finally received both his Einstein Visa and green card. “I feel a lot of relief because now, with a permanent residency, there’s a lot of things that I can explore and contribute which were not available to me as an international student or as an immigrant,” Chowdhury said, adding that he now mentors other immigrants navigating the system.
But for others still at the beginning of an uncertain immigration limbo, it’s very different. One African data scientist who is currently developing AI tools for an investment management firm said he received his H-1B visa last month. The employee, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his H-1B status, said he made sure to get stamped before Trump’s inauguration due to “all the uncertainty around the administration.”
After six years, he will have to apply for another temporary visa sponsored by his company, which will first have to post a job opening publicly to prove it cannot be filled by an American worker. Only then can he start the process of applying for a green card. “When you’re working and you see your job already being advertised, it’s a weird situation,” he said.
Ideally, he says he would like to work for an AI startup, but it’s too risky. “I still love my current company, but I think I would be more open to other stuff, but you have to think about how secure is this company?” he continued: “If you’re a permanent resident, you can take any job, and if you lose it, you’ll find another one. But for me, I have 60 days to find another job–and I don’t even get unemployment even though I pay unemployment tax as an H-1B.”
With Trump in the White House, Munjala, the biopharmaceutical AI specialist, is playing it safe. He doesn’t want to risk leaving the U.S. to visit his parents in India and show off his two children, one of whom—a 10-month-old daughter—they’ve never met in person.
Like many temporary visa holders, Munjala fears that Trump will quickly act on his promise to upend U.S. immigration laws and block the return of legal temporary visa holders who happen to be outside the country. If so, he could suddenly be unable to return to the U.S., where both of his children are citizens.
“Being trapped outside the U.S. would be incredibly stressful, especially with two young kids ,” he said in a text message. “The strain on the entire family would be immense, with the added worry of our homes and financial investments, and the uncertainty about how my U.S. career could be affected. It would feel like everything we’ve worked for is at risk.”
