Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rebuffed Indians’ angry criticisms of President Donald Trump’s migration policy, which threatens to curb the movement of many Indians into Americans’ neighborhoods, jobs, and schools.

“Everything that you do as a country needs to be in your national interest, and that includes your immigration policy,” Rubio said during a press conference in New Delhi, India, on Sunday.

He offered some reassurance to Indians, whose economic strategy sends millions of young Indian migrants to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East:

Anytime you reform a system, there’s going to be some disruptions, there’s going to be some hiccups, there’s going to be some inconvenience, but we think in the long term we’re going to have a system that’s much more stable, much more viable.

On Friday, for example, top officials announced new rules that effectively deny legalization to millions of resident migrants who broke U.S. laws. That rule, for example, would likely block the legalization of many Indians who broke U.S. laws to get jobs in Indian-operated hotels, restaurants, and franchise outlets.

At the press conference with Rubio, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, politely warned Rubio that migration curbs might result in India reducing its purchases of U.S. grains, oil, and various products:

While we cooperate to deal with illegal and irregular mobility, our expectation is that legal mobility would not be adversely impacted as a consequence. After all, this is very relevant to our business, technology, and research cooperation.

Since at least 1990, India’s predatory migration strategy has proved extremely successful. For example, India has ruthlessly worked with U.S. investors to enroll mixed-skill Indians in the L-1, H-1B, H4EAD, and OPT programs. That combined effort has pushed many Indians into the heart of American industries and has pulled many Americans’ jobs and much Wall Street investment back into India.

Roughly 5 million Indians now live in the United States.

Many U.S. lobbyists, lawyers, and immigration reformers expect that Wall Street lobbyists will ensure that Trump’s new legalization curbs will be applied loosely to India’s white-collar graduates in the tech sector.

But they also expect the rules to pressure many illegal, temporary, and quasi-legal migrants to leave the United States, such as the many Biden-era economic migrants who were given parole at the border or Temporary Protected Status after their illegal migration.

Rubio diplomatically zig-zagged through the sometimes-hostile Indian press conference, without making any public concessions to India’s demands for more Indian migration into Americans’ society:

He was asked:

Indian students, engineers, doctors, researchers have contributed enormously to U.S. economy and innovation ecosystems, but the recent changes in F-1 [student] visa, H-1B [white collar] visa are being seen in India as hurting the core pillar of people-to-people relationships [migration]? What does your administration have to say about this in regard to Indians, and the message to Indians in this regard?

Rubio responded:

I take and accept what you just said about the contribution that Indians have made to the U.S. economy. Over $20 billion has been invested in the U.S. economy by Indian companies. We want that number to continue to increase, and obviously, the expertise as well that they’ve provided to our economy has been very, very valuable.

…

The changes that are happening now, the modernization of our migration system into the United States … is not India-specific. It is global, it’s being applied across the world. We are in a period of modernization, and I’ll be frank and honest with you, because it’s important to talk about this.

We’ve had a migratory crisis in the United States. This is not because of India, but broadly. We had over 20 million people illegally enter the United States over the last few years, and we’ve had to address that challenge.

In addition to that challenge, and I think this is true for India, this is true for every country in the world; Everything that you do as a country needs to be in your national interest, and that includes your immigration policy.

The United States, I believe, is the most welcoming country in the world. … Every single year, a million people roughly become permanent residents of the United States and contribute greatly. My parents entered the United States as permanent residents in 1956 from Cuba, and so it’s a process that’s enriched us, but it has to be a process that’s adjusted in every era to the realities of the modern times in which you live. It is long overdue.

Rubio continued:

So, the United States is currently undergoing a process of reforming the system by which we choose how many people come into our country, who comes in, when they come in, etc. Anytime you undertake a reform, anytime you undertake a change in the system by which you admit people, or frankly, anytime you undertake a reform in any system, not just on immigration — there’s going to be a period of transition that’s going to create, you know, some friction points and some difficulties … I think we’re going to wind up with a system that’s more efficient and better than the previous system

…

What I want to leave clear is that the changes, while they may be having a disproportionate impact on a place like India that provides so many high-skilled workers to the U.S. economy, it is not a system that is targeted in India is one that’s being applied globally, but we’re in a period of transition, and like any period of transition, you know, there’s going to be some bumps on that road.

But we think ultimately our destination is going to be a better system, a more efficient system that works better than the one that we had in place previously. And more sustainable, by the way.

So far, Trump has largely protected the white-collar programs used by the Indian government and by Chinese policymakers, even as he has established many new programs to block illegal migrants and to deport at least 800,000.

Those trade policies have pushed millions of ordinary white-collar Americans out of professional jobs, and shifted vast wealth to Indians, Wall Street, U.S. universities, and some U.S. export industries. This vast economic transfer has fueled the rising white-collar opposition to migration — and is spurring much sharp-edged criticism of Indian migrants in the United States.

But Rubio’s pro-American policies are a vast improvement for Americans than the pro-migration policies of the Biden administration.

“Since becoming Ambassador, we’ve increased our visas by more than 60 percent, eliminated wait times for all visa types, except for first-time visitor visas,” Biden’s ambassador to India — Ambassador Eric Garcetti — said in his departure speech in January 2025.

Garcetti continued, “For a second year in a row, we issued more than one million nonimmigrant visas, including a record number of visitor visas … more than five million Indians currently hold a [multi-year, multi-use] United States visa.”

In 2022, one Indian visa worker told Breitbart News:

The embassy has become so easy, the people can just walk over them, and they will just issue the visa. It’s no big deal now. Sham marriages are no big deal. Tourist visas? People don’t even have to prove anything. They just go [answer] two questions for the sake of it. I follow [social media] groups …. where these people post their experiences from interviews, and every second interview experience [reported] that “this officer only asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ The officer only asked me, ‘Are you going on this visa?’ The people only asked me if you’re going to stay for long. ‘Okay, done. Here’s your visa.”

“More than two million Indians traveled to the United States in the first eleven months of 2024, a 26 percent increase over the same period in 2023,” Garcetti’s deputies said in a December 27, 2024, note titled “U.S. Mission to India Continues to Break Records in 2024.”