When Congress created the H-1B visa in 1990, Indian engineers and technology professionals rapidly became its largest beneficiaries, and within a generation became its dominant force, reshaping the U.S. technology industry and the politics of American immigration. The 2000 American Competitiveness Act expanded job portability and green card protections for H-1B workers. By 2019, a sustained grassroots campaign to eliminate per-country green card caps had reframed the backlog crisis, affecting hundreds of thousands of Indian American workers — as a defining test of equity in U.S. immigration. Three decades of organizing had turned a visa category into a civil rights cause.
