Indian students and the death of the American Dream

Story of visa revocation and uncertainty for Indian students in the U.S. amid policy changes and legal battles

Kabir has spent the past few months running. Every morning, before the California sun begins to glare on the cracked sidewalks, he slips on his shoes and bolts out the door. The run, he says, is what keeps him sane. “It’s the only time I can make a plan. What to say to the lawyer. Which papers to organise. Who to call for help.” How not to fall apart.

Kabir (name changed on request), who had arrived from Pune to study at the University of California, had his student visa revoked along with thousands of others across the country. The email had come without warning. It had given him no time to prepare. Just a sudden vanishing of the ground beneath his feet. He hasn’t stopped running since. “I got this news on April 2, just a day after Eid. I had wanted to go home, but couldn’t in these circumstances,” he says.

And now, it may be a long while before he can. His Eid kurta and suit are still on the hanger, waiting to be worn. His apartment still carries the remnants of a celebration that didn’t last. A few half-deflated balloons cling to the ceiling — a bittersweet memory, as just a few days before his visa revocation, he had won the H-1B lottery (a random selection process by which a limited number of H-1B visas are allotted every year).

In the weeks that followed, Kabir’s days became a blur — mornings on the pavement, afternoons in legal and immigration offices, evenings in community centres where other students like him sat huddled on plastic chairs, comparing legal notes, wondering what they had done wrong. Each time, the same questions, the same uncertainty, hung like static in the air.

“I run, I walk, I travel. Anything to escape my thoughts,” says Kabir. And yet, they are everywhere. In the faces of the other students who are caught in the same dragnet. In a mural stretched across a wall in Los Angeles that says, ‘My brother and I are my parents’ American Dream.’

Kabir’s story is not his alone. Thousands like Kabir have been left in limbo, their futures upended by the shifting tides of immigration law and political mood in the United States.

In March, the Trump administration announced that it was cancelling $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and other alleged violations. Similar action was also directed against other Ivy League institutions such as Cornell, UPenn, Harvard, Brown, and Princeton.