A deep churning is taking place in the United States after Donald Trump took charge as President for a second term. Several of his decisions and actions are being challenged legally and politically within the US itself, while he’s also sending shockwaves to the wider world in terms of an upward revision of trade tariffs for imports and much else. The latest are the changes in the taxation policy in the US, with a process currently on to charge a hefty 3.5 per cent for immigrants sending money to their families back home. The bill, after passing the first post, is now before the US Senate which could pass, modify or even nullify the change. Such moves should be of special concern to us. India is the world’s top recipient of remittances, some 28 percent of this is coming from the US now, totalling over $30 billion as per RBI statistics. In fact, Western nations replaced the Gulf states as the main fund transferor of Indian immigrant populations of late. The Indian workforce in the US is believed to be sending some 20 percent of their earnings to their homes/bank accounts here. Trump’s original proposal was to charge as high as five per cent tax on this. Any dispensation that means business would be required to take decisions that hurt one segment or the other for the overall well-being of the nation. A please-all government, as is often the case with democracies like India, is no government worth the name. Yet, freewheeling changes in a ham-handed manner would have their negative consequences too.
Trump, on his part, is picking one and all. That he has put Harvard on notice with curbs on international student admissions and a threat to review $9billion in federal funding for the university came as another shock. His plan is to cut it by one-third and assign this three billion to fund trade schools and support the national economic surge. On top of this, in another brow-beating, the administration has warned international students that their visa would be revoked if they skipped classes. Student protests against issues like Israel’s genocidal acts against Palestine; pushes against Palestinians in “anti-Semitic” Harvard could be a reason. A threat is also that such students would not get US visas in future. Alongside, there’s worry among Indian immigrants about the administration’s move to scrap the Optional Practical Training (OPT) for students working in the US after their graduation. Clearly, things are getting hot for the immigrants in the US under Trump’s second term. Retrenchments in the IT sector there, which employs large numbers of Indians, have seen a significant increase in recent months. The confidence levels of the immigrants in the IT sector has been hugely dented even as large numbers of Indian companies lead the way in the US.
