US Trump card against Indian immigrants

Most Indians have never heard of Donald Trump. He was a relative unknown even to most Americans until 2004. A television show, The Apprentice , changed all that. Hosted by Trump, the programme was a high profile job interview of sorts with all the bells and whistles of a reality game show. Eighteen people would compete for the opportunity to run one of Trump’s many companies. Each episode invariably ended with Trump dismissing a contestant: “You’re fired!”.

The show ran for 11 years and 14 seasons and resulted in Trump becoming a household name across America. In June, when he announced that he would run as a Republican candidate for President, many laughed it off as yet another stunt. They are now having to scramble to save face.

There are 16 contenders for the Republican nomination including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Florida senator Marco Rubio. But Trump has been consistently leading in the polls.

The field is so large that Fox News, hosting the first debate of the 2016 season on Aug 6, split the candidates across two debates — one reserved for the top 10 and the second, for the rest. Debates this early typically attract about 2 million viewers. But Nielsen’s ratings for the debate that featured Trump showed that nearly 24 million viewers had tuned into the show — a record for any primary debate in the history of US elections.

After brushing him off as a circus clown, the media has finally begun paying attention to him. On August 16, he landed a full show with the #1 public affairs TV show in the country, Meet the Press on NBC, where he was interviewed for 38 minutes on every policy question plaguing the country — from trade to taxes to foreign policy to women’s health to immigration. Trump is known not to have any advisors, pollsters or campaign staff. Whether or not one agreed with him, his performance was impressive. He spoke his mind and because his words were not poll-tested, he seemed genuine. Which is why he has kept his lead in the polls.

Trump also separately released his immigration plan the same day. A quick read reveals his harsh proposals, including finding and deporting every illegal alien in the country and calling for an end to birthright citizenship, saying it “remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration”.

But deeper into the five-page document, Indians and Indian IT companies are indirectly targeted. If elected , he promises to rescind Barack Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration. This presumably means he will end the programme that automatically extends work authorisation permits to spouses of Indian H-1B visa-holders who have already applied for green cards. Continuing to exploit the electorate’s protectionist sensibilities, he says that America graduates two times more STEM degree holders each year than STEM jobs but laments that “two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program”.

He proposes to raise the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs which will “force companies to give these coveted entry level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the US, instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas.” Finally, he says that he will bring back a requirement for companies to hire American workers first saying that too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement.

While it is still implausible that Trump will win the Republican nomination, he is a threat to the party because he has not ruled out a third-party bid. If he runs as an Independent candidate , he is sure to siphon off sufficient male white votes to hand the election over to the Democrat candidate, most likely the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. This is exactly what happened in 1992 when Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton win the presidency over George HW Bush.

Because Perot won nearly 19 per cent of the vote, both political parties took it upon themselves to rein the debt in and passed the first balanced budget in a generation. If history repeats itself, many of Trump’s immigration proposals could have bipartisan support. And this can’t be good news for India and the Indian IT majors.

The writer is MD of Rao Advisors LLC

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