A tale of two dilemmas
Our predicaments have a tendency of revealing our priorities, and an introspection on this issue leads us to confront uncomfortable realities. The entire world had braced itself when Donald Trump emerged victorious in the 2024 US presidential election, and with a popular mandate too. The US, however, had already begun growing wary of neoliberalism during the Biden presidency itself, as evident through the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act, which sought to bring manufacturing back home. And a second term for Trump meant policies such as tariffs and ‘America First’ movement would be intensified.
In a single day (Jan 20), Trump signed a total of 26 executive orders, two of which are crucial toward understanding the perception behind the predicaments. Namely, Executive Order 14159, ‘Protecting the American People Against Invasion’; and Executive Order 14169, ‘Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid’, respectively. These policies enacted in a country nearly 12,000 kilometers from Nepal reflect a rift much closer to home.
A rift in the sense that each of these impacted Nepal and India—but differently, revealing our distinct forms of reliance on the superpower.
In 2023, Nepal received $145.8m in financial assistance from the US; the same year India ranked first among countries of origin for recipients of the H-1B visa with 279,386 beneficiaries. It becomes clearer with this context how the two executive orders could cause a conundrum for the two countries, with the direct challenges for Nepal appearing starker than for India.
While a knee-jerk change in immigration policy in Canada was met with far more contention, sharp criticism from the Indian media, and protests by Indian students. The Indian government, however, seemed placated and far more vocal in support of American prerogatives, than it ever was about Canadian ones, despite the far more stringent American policy of unceremoniously deporting illegal immigrants. And this, even as a Pew Research Center report mentioned that in 2022 there were 725,000 unauthorized Indian immigrants in the US. India had instead decided to cooperate, and 18,000 of such immigrants were slated to be repatriated. And the first 104 among them had landed in India in February, to the opposition’s jeers and the government’s justifications.
So, why such different responses toward two policies—both of which were more or less regressive and restrictive toward immigration. The answer lies in the nature of H-1B, specialty occupation, visas. One law review article authored during a pre-Trump controversy featuring this provision in 2009 (as two US senators had introduced a bill which would require all employers to consider qualified American candidates before resorting to H-1B visa recipients) stated, “The primary benefit to an offshore outsourcer using the H-1B visa is knowledge transfer.”
The crux of this issue lies in the fact that the H-1B visa is critical to India’s IT sector in terms of transfer of knowledge and revenue. A 2024 article in Reuters outlined how any impediment in H-1B visa rollout could have an adverse impact on the Indian IT industry. Therefore, to avoid a battle on two fronts—the deportation and the probable H-1B oriented retaliation which would’ve come, and lose it, India seems to have prioritized what truly matters in the long run—its knowledge economy.
And, while India’s predicament is somewhat pragmatic, the situation for Nepal borders on being precarious. Not because Nepal cannot survive without US financial assistance, but in several projects, USAID is a major benefactor. And now those have been left rudderless. A flurry of articles on this issue had given the Nepali people a crash course on USAID, and the range of projects it is involved in, demonstrating the breadth and depth of aid absorption in Nepal.
Moreover, weaning off the aid cannot be abrupt, and the relevance of reliance on first world nations, in Nepal’s case, cannot be understated either. So, we as a country should take a page out of India’s book, and focus on a comparatively more productive form of dependence such as capacity building and transfer of knowledge. This way, unlike financial assistance, which is exhaustible and can be stalled, talent gained can be reproduced, and successful models and initiatives replicated.
The concept of ‘brain-circulation’ as an alternative to ‘brain-drain’ is already prevalent, introduced by AnnaLee Saxenian. In a 2002 article she posits that, “Economically speaking, it is blessed to give and to receive,” explaining that the mobility of high-skilled immigrants creates a mutually beneficial economic ecosystem, facilitating a technology transfer.
Thankfully, Nepal has an adequate initiative in place, before proceeding. The Brain Gain Center (BGC), was launched on 7 May 2019, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the very purpose of bridging the gap between the concerned authorities and the expatriate intelligentsia. It had gained a lot of initial traction, as within 25 days (May 7-31) of its launch, spearheaded by announcements from Nepali embassies, 450+ individuals had registered themselves on its website. However, even as we have now entered 2025, the platform only has a total of 1032 registrations.
Nevertheless, BGC remains a well-positioned asset for Nepal to jumpstart a new and far more sustainable dynamic. A dynamic that is not jeopardized as soon as a new government jettisons into office in a land far-far-away, allowing us to choose the lesser of two dilemmas.
