By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK – There’s the fear of Armageddon – the Doomsday Clock striking midnight, Earth destroyed by irreversible waves of mushroom clouds and tsunamis after the explosion of multiple nuclear bombs obliterating continents. There are visceral phobias shaped by popular streaming shows like ‘The Last of Us’, with fungi, viruses and zombies wiping out humankind.
For a 14-year-old girl, living in Conway, Arkansas, fear was very much rooted in desperate reality. It gnawed through her senses and psyches: displacement from home; and subsequent deportation to India if her father, Pavan Roy Marupally, lost his job and legal status of H-1B visa.
Her mother, Sridevi Eadara, had already lost her job. Her father’s job was in imminent danger, as he had confided to his family. If he did lose his job, according to immigration rules, he would have only 60 days to either find another job or self-deport himself and his family back to the country of his origin, India.
That belief of impending disaster and perceived existential threat of being uprooted from the place she called home, is what likely led to Tanvi Marupally, a student at Conway Junior High School, who loved to visit state parks with her family, to run away on January 17, after attending school.
In an interview to ABC News, Tanvi’s father disclosed a conversation he had with her a few days before, and plans to enact if he were to lose his job in the tech industry: “I said…let you and your mom first go back to India, let me figure out what and how the system works out, get a proper job, and then call you back.” In response, Tanvi said, “What, go back to India? Why should I go back to India? I’ve been here.”
Tanvi had planned her get away: she left her smart watch and phone at home to not be tracked by location services. Since that tragic day more than three weeks ago, the U.S. Marshals Service and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have also lent their resources to help find her. The people of Conway have led myriad searches for her, putting up missing person posters in plenty of neighborhoods.
Tanvi’s devastated parents, who confided to local media that their daughter was the reason they emigrated to the US – to give her a better life – have announced a reward of $5,000 for her safe return by her birthday, on March 24.
“She’s the motivation for both of us to come here (to the US). If she wasn’t there, we would have no purpose to come here. Every day we are walking on the edge, trying to keep her safe, provide a better life,” Tanvi’s mother Sridevi told ABC News.
All to no avail. Tanvi remains missing.
Tanvi’s father informed authorities that he is no longer at risk of losing his job, at least for now. The question is: has Tanvi even read that, fathomed the appeal in her father’s words, imploring her to show up back home?
For now, Tanvi has become another statistic in the growing database of missing youth in the US. In 2021, there were over 337,000 reports of missing youth entered into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center. Youth accounted for 32% of the over 93,700 active missing person records as of December 2021.
Tanvi’s likely mental distress, inevitable febrile imagination of concocting horrors of displacement and loss, is what many H1-B visa holders worry about most.
Most H1-B visa holders and their dependents live a life of duress and uncertainty, till they get permanent residency. Wait times for a Green Card has gotten longer; some stretching to decades.
The recent spate of layoffs in the tech industry has impacted tens of thousands of Indian families in the US, shattered many an American Dream. Their biggest worry is how their children will cope if they were to be uprooted from life in the US; would they be able to carve out a happy life in a country they are not familiar with?
Although Tanvi is arguably the first such reported case of a teenager running away from home because of fear of visa status implosion, thousands of Indian households in the US dependent on a visa status are now facing a stressful reality.
Tech companies shed more than 150,000 workers in 2022, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi. The Wall Street Journal reported today the tech industry has cut more than 257,000 jobs since last year. The rampant layoffs continue this year, with no end in sight. Big Tech has even suspended Green Card initiation for new hires on a visa.
In December of last year, CBS Bay Area News reported on some 30 or so people on H-1B visa who marched in San Jose, California, for a bill to be passed to remove country caps on Green Cards, which has affected Indian nationals the most.
One of the protesters, Akhilesh Malavalli, who had his small son on his shoulders as he spoke, told the channel: “We all have applied for a Green Card and it has been approved. Only thing is, we need to wait 150 years to get a Green Card. A hundred fifty years! I’ll be dead. I’ll be dead by the time we see a Green Card.”
The CBS report noted what perhaps most H-1B visa holders dare not tell their children growing up: even if they maintain their jobs, but don’t get a Green Card by the time their child or children turn 21, then the child, or rather young person, would either be forced to self-deport or have to try get another visa to stay on in the country. Also, the Green Card application for that once-upon-a-time-child would have to be done again, effectively ensuring that the family is separated, perhaps forever.
There are ample number of stories of children of H-1B workers who are on an H-1B visa themselves, after being on a F-1 student visa in college. In that aspect, the life of these youth who grew up in the country legally, are on par with Dreamers, who don’t have legal documents. Both are caught up in the same dire predicament: fear of sudden deportation to a country they are not too familiar with.
It’s not just Indian nationals who are caught in the tech layoffs and loss of visa status.
The Wall Street Journal reported today of a Chinese national who lost her job at Google last month, and now worries who will take care of her dog, a German Shepherd, if she were to leave the country. In big Chinese cities, where tech jobs are, keeping large dogs as pets often isn’t allowed.
The number of tech jobs in the U.S. declined by 32,000 last month, according to IT industry trade group CompTIA. There were 269,000 tech job postings in January, CompTIA says, down from a record high of 394,000 job postings last March, the Journal reported.
The Journal reported on a recent graduate, Sushant Arora from India, who received his master’s degree in project management in the US in 2021 and until last month was employed as an analyst at a data-analytics company in Boston. He was laid off last month.
“It’s like a nightmare,” he was quoted as saying. Since being laid off, Arora estimates he has applied for between 500 and 600 jobs and had three interviews.
President Biden didn’t mention either India or workers from India in his recent SOTU address. He did mention comprehensive immigration reforms, though. It’s high time that the issue of legal immigration reform is not just seen as an immigration issue but as a real humanitarian crisis, in the light of the ongoing tech layoffs.
If the US can give tens of thousands of Green Cards every year through the Diversity Visa Program, often to impoverished people from across the world; give money and resources to help settle the recipients down, then they should really also focus on the plight of youth like Tanvi Marupally who has lived her life in the US but could be forced to get on a plane and leave America with two suitcases in tow. Or worse, as she’s already done, flee from home; put her life in danger.
The US should allow ample time for people like her and her family to try stay on in the US. Not throw them out after 60 days. Tanvi’s parents, like most H-1B visa holders, will not live on charity, even if both of them lost their jobs. They would have spent their savings trying to find a new job and stay on in the country they call home, to help their daughter achieve her ambitions.
The US should give H-1B visa holders who suddenly lose a job a chance to achieve their American Dream; to perhaps turn that 60-day interim period to six months, at least. They should help in trying to prevent another child from running away from home fearing the calamity of deportation.
In the throes of her mental distress and fear, Tanvi couldn’t understand that by running away from home, she perhaps gave herself a deportation from life itself.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of www.indiaoverseasreport.com. Follow him on Twitter @SujeetRajan1)