Indian-American tech leader Aditya Agarwal comments on H-1B visa debate

Indian-American tech leader Aditya Agarwal comments on H-1B visa issue.

Indian-origin tech leader Aditya Agarwal shared his experience of coming to the US as a student and then becoming a US citizen and said a lot of people have started commenting on the visa issues without actually going through it. The comments came as the Donald Trump administration introduced several proposals, rules that eventually make it harder for work visa holders to stay in the US for a long time. "I am a proud American citizen who has also had the following visas: F1, OPT, CPT, H1-B, EB-3 Green Card etc," Agarwal said adding that H-1B abuse has to be stopped 100% but it is also true that high-skilled Indians have it harder in the US than most. "There is abuse of the H1-B system. We should 100% stop that. It prevents legitimate use cases. I am glad the government is doing something about this," Agarwal said. "We make it too hard for truly high-skilled workers to stay in the USA. It is a huge source of strength for us that the sharpest minds in the world WANT to come here," he said, adding that any country should prioritize its own citizens. A tech storm has been brewing as many tech leaders have expressed their opinion that only skill should be prioritized in hiring, and not nationality. While Elon Musk also agreed to this, Y Combinator partner Ankit Gupta suggested that if Americans have to be prioritized for hiring by US companies, then it is also like DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), a comment that riled up government officials. YC clarified that they prefer Americans in hiring and Gupta made his social media accounts private in the wake of the controversy.

Who is Aditya Agarwal?

According to his bio on South Park Commons, a venture capital firm, Aditya Agarwal is a General Partner based in San Francisco. He was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Dropbox where he scaled the engineering team from 25 to 1000. Before Dropbox, Aditya co-founded Cove, a company that was building modern collaboration software. Prior to Cove, Aditya was one of Facebook’s first engineers. He helped build the first versions of key products like Search, NewsFeed and Messenger. He then became Facebook’s first director of Product Engineering, overseeing engineering for products like NewsFeed, Profile, Groups and Events. Aditya served on the boards of FlipKart, Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and the Anita Borg Institute. He is also an active investor and advisor to Silicon Valley startups. Aditya holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.