The H-1B program has always been the main route for foreign tech talent, especially from India and China, to build careers in the U.S. Now, it’s running into stricter security checks. Officials comb through an applicant’s entire online life and employment history, looking for any hint of involvement in “censorship” or suppression of “protected expression.” The language is vague by design, and the stakes are high. What used to be a straightforward process to find talent now feels like a political test.

This policy change doesn’t just hit a handful of people—it affects a huge pool of professionals and students who count on the H-1B as their ticket to a future in the U.S. India leads the pack, with its citizens making up the biggest share of the roughly 400,000 H-1B approvals each year (mostly renewals). During the 2023–2024 academic year, more than 420,000 Indian students held F-1 or M-1 visas, and almost 98,000 of them moved to the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which is the main stepping stone to H-1B. And when the government tried to end automatic work-permit extensions for H-4 spouses—mostly Indian women in skilled jobs—it threw thousands of families into financial limbo.

Now, anyone applying for H-1B, H-4, F, M, or J visas has to make their social media public. The U.S. wants to screen for political alignment, plain and simple. This has a chilling effect: foreign workers start second-guessing what they post or who they connect with. Stack this on top of other recent changes—a $100,000 fee on new H-1Bs, the end of work-permit extensions—and the whole system feels unstable. For Indian students, the path from studying in the U.S. to working and eventually settling here gets even more daunting; especially given the years-long green card backlog (over 1.2 million are waiting in employment-based queues). All these hurdles add up. The U.S. is losing its edge as a magnet for global talent, as skilled workers look to places like Canada or the UK for a clearer, fairer shot.