Tech professionals around the world are on the edge as President Donald Trump and his administration impose a series of radical immigration measures.

From deporting foreign nationals who are permanent legal residents to barring visitors from entering the country for expressing views on U.S. foreign policy, immigrants have seen a tumultuous couple of months.

Last week, reports said the U.S. government is considering placing travel restrictions on citizens from 43 countries. The plan would completely ban travel from 11 nations, impose heavy curbs on 10 others, and give 22 countries a 60-day ultimatum to address perceived deficiencies or risk moving to one of the other categories.

While workers from the target nations make up a relatively small percentage of the tech workforce, industry professionals outside the purview of the measures, too, have been increasingly concerned about being impacted by the shifting visa policies and anti-immigration rhetoric.

They are particularly worried about increased scrutiny of the H-1B visa, which is sought after by tech companies.

Immigration attorneys are now advising clients on temporary U.S. visas to avoid leaving the country, warning they may encounter difficulties when attempting to return.

“There has been a surge in audits and enforcement actions against employers hiring foreign workers, creating job insecurity for legal immigrant employees,” Poorvi Chothani, managing partner at immigration law firm LawQuest, told Rest of World. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been increasingly visiting employees’ homes to “check if they are legally working from home,” she said in a statement. Chothani’s firm represents hundreds of individual and corporate clients.

Rest of World spoke with tech workers across several countries to record their concerns. Several of them asked to remain anonymous, fearing backlash from the U.S. visa authorities.

A manager at a Chinese tech company, China

I have a 10-year visa, so I do not think this will affect me. But I want to get my husband a visa, too, and I am worried that his application will be rejected. I heard it is hard to get even a tourist visa right now — people seem to be getting rejected for no reason. 

I own property in the U.S. and if I am there to travel and visit friends, I would surely like to go with my husband. But given the situation, we wouldn’t dare to apply right now because if there is a record of him getting rejected once, it would be harder to get a visa in the future.

I realized that the immigration system would always be a noose around my neck.

Atal Aggarwal, founder of immigration-focused software development firm OpenSphere, India

I lived in the U.S. on H-1B for seven years. I wanted to build my own company and realized that the immigration system would always be a noose around my neck. I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted but it felt like it was a system where I kept pumping cash to get the right legal status. It just wasn’t working out for me.

Around November last year, I thought I should take control of my life and work on achieving my dreams instead of waiting for the U.S. government’s help.

I returned to India, and since then, I have seen a lot of community news about the struggles Indians are facing with the immigration system without a proper way forward. People are realizing it’s not worth the stress and that it’s not going to get better for the next four years until Trump is out of power. So they are moving ahead — either returning home or shifting to other countries where they can have a better life without the worries about immigration systems.

A Nigerian entrepreneur who lives with his family in Austin, Texas

One of my friends who lives in the U.S. got fired last weekend. Now, he has just 30 days to find another job or leave the country. He relocated from Nigeria to the U.S. with his wife and children last year. They sold everything they owned back in Nigeria before moving.

There are several immigration changes already affecting business or will make it harder to do business in the U.S. in the future. For example, the U.S. “Gold Card,” which everyone is talking about, is hard for any entrepreneur to get because of global taxation norms.

Even though I am on a green card right now and the recent visa changes have not affected me, the truth is that I need to rethink my future. I will definitely relocate out of the U.S. and I’m planning to start looking for another country.

An Indian tech worker employed at a big tech firm in California

I hold a green card but my family back in India is worried that if I travel to meet them, I might face difficulty reentering the U.S. My family is even worried about anything I post on my social media.

I had a son six months ago and we wanted to take him to meet his grandparents in India. Typically, our parents would be excited about it but this time, given the fears around visas and layoffs in Silicon Valley, they asked if they should come to the U.S. because “what if you guys come here and they never let you back in?”

I am finally traveling back later this week, and my dad is constantly calling me to ask me not to take anything lightly, to stay safe, to carry my old green card and visa paperwork, and not leave anything to chance. It’s not advice I am used to hearing from my father. I am used to him saying, “Come on. Life will be good.”

I don’t even know if I want to live in the U.S. for the rest of my life. My personal bias towards the American Dream is at risk.

An Indian tech worker at a tech firm in the U.S.

I am on an H-1B and I’ve reached a stage where I feel like if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just go back to India. My sister’s visa to visit me was rejected last week, which is something I had never heard of happening before.

I don’t know if it’s about the last two months as much as it is about the past 10 years. Being stuck in the H-1B loop for an Indian is always bad. What Trump can do is make certain things harder. But he is not the one who introduced the deathly 18- or 20-year waits for green cards. That has always been the reality of H-1B workers. But how much harder can they make it for someone stuck in the 18-year timeline for a green card?

My personal bias towards the American Dream is at risk.

An Indian tech consultant with a large consulting firm, U.S.

It is a strange situation. I know of people making hundreds of thousands of dollars but they know that they will have to move to Canada next June because their visa won’t be extended. In any other situation, if you made that kind of money, it would be wild to imagine that you can’t even stay where you want to stay.

It restricts how you make your life decisions or travel or see your family. People can’t get married or fly to attend a funeral.

The correct term to describe my status in the U.S. is “a non-resident alien.” I am not an illegal alien, but I am an alien nonetheless. I am not a citizen so I don’t have a voice in how things function. It may seem unfair but you voluntarily sign up for it and most of us don’t really think it through in the hope of a better life.

India’s booming quick-commerce sector saw a major casualty earlier this year.

Dunzo, the first Indian startup to receive a direct investment from Google in 2017, shut down in January, leaving hundreds of consultants, vendors, employees, and delivery workers unpaid. Rest of World spoke to Dunzo’s former employees, investors, and industry experts, who revealed how mismanagement, operational challenges, and fierce competition led to its demise.

Indeed, there are flaws embedded in the very concept of fast commerce that have taken down many players. “Most of these models such as quick commerce are thriving due to investor funding and cheap labor,” Yugal Joshi, partner at global tech research and advisory firm Everest Group, told Rest of World. “Though they have a revenue model of charging delivery fees, most of their value is through loss leadership.”

Dunzo’s CEO, Kabeer Biswas, declined to comment. Rest of World also reached out to other Dunzo founders and its key investors Reliance and Google, but received no response.

Dunzo was launched in 2014 as a WhatsApp-based, concierge-style pick-up and drop-off service. Its agents would, for instance, collect laundry, buy and deliver ingredients for a meal, or bring the wallet a user forgot at home to their office.

The company’s steady growth in a country where 90% of startups fail earned it a distinct reputation: Customers would simply “Dunzo it” when they needed something.

By 2020, the quick-commerce sector in India began gaining significant traction and Dunzo decided to jump on the bandwagon. It launched Dunzo Daily, a service that delivered goods from the company’s “dark stores” instead of other retail outlets.

Dark stores is something of a misnomer for neighborhood-based warehouses owned by quick-commerce companies, where supplies are stocked and accessed only by gig workers who pick up online orders and deliver them to customers.

This shift pitted Dunzo against deep-pocketed rivals such as Swiggy Instamart, the Zomato-backed Blinkit, and the Y Combinator-backed Zepto, which had started ramping up their warehouse expansion.

Dunzo’s strategic misstep was shifting from its core strength — connecting buyers and sellers online — to aggressively scaling quick-commerce operations through a network of dark stores, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Dunzo’s early-stage investor, told Rest of World.

“Some of the elements of what we [Dunzo] started off with … was to empower the local stores. A dark store is the antithesis of that,” Chattopadhyay said.

Dunzo expanded to 15 cities and operated 120 dark stores, but remained at half the capacity of its rival Blinkit.

The company also struggled to run these stores, Manmeet Kaur, a former brand safety and escalation desk officer at Dunzo’s New Delhi office, told Rest of World.

“Customers were screaming at me and riders were screaming at me,” she said. “There were no offices for riders where they can go and file a complaint.”

Other former employees told Rest of World the company encountered new problems: battling rivals in price wars, maintaining higher app user retention, and balancing operational costs with the company’s pan-India expansion.

Dunzo “started off with some certain selected products and they didn’t extend their assortments,” Karan Taurani, vice president at investment firm Elara Capital, told Rest of World. “The app experience was kind of mixed. They didn’t create that impact of branding. … On the other hand, other players came in pretty aggressively.”

The expansion and financial setbacks went hand in hand — the company’s losses were pegged at $88 million in 2021.

In January 2022, Reliance Group, headed by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, invested $200 million in Dunzo for a 25.8% stake, becoming its largest shareholder.

Reliance may have “wanted to compete aggressively in [the] quick-commerce segment,” making Dunzo a strategic ally, Joshi from Everest Group told Rest of World.

Flush with funds, that October, Dunzo reportedly spent 400 million rupees ($4.6 million) to run a viral 20-second ad campaign during the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket competition — the second most-valued sporting league globally after the NFL. In the immediate term, traffic to the app skyrocketed. But the fervor was short-lived.

Meanwhile, Reliance’s investment added a new dimension to the company’s daily operations. Dunzo staff were tasked with providing back-end support and delivery services for Reliance’s e-commerce platform JioMart, straining resources and blurring mandates, at least three former employees told Rest of World.

“The company’s package drop services, which were still valuable to customers, also suffered as it expanded to quick commerce,” said Joshi.

By 2023, signs of trouble began to emerge.

At least four former employees told Rest of World Dunzo started missing salary payments, delayed appraisal cycles, and did not pay the government taxes that the company had deducted from workers’ salaries starting mid-2023. The company, which used to answer employee questions and post revenue numbers in Slack channels, did an about-face on transparency. It started muting people on Zoom calls, and picking and choosing questions posted in the chat.

The same year, Dunzo owed over 114 million rupees ($1.3 million) in unpaid ad dues and vendor payments to Facebook, Google, marketing agency CupShup, tech cooperative Nilenso, and others.

Dunzo entered a state of flux — the employees said it could neither commit fully to quick commerce nor maintain a competitive edge over its original model, which was to act as a marketplace aggregator.

Dunzo warehouses grappled with pricing discrepancies, expired products, and slow order fulfillment, while delivery workers struggled to get uniforms and bags from the company, Kaur said.

Until she was laid off in August 2024, Kaur had merchants reaching out to her on LinkedIn, asking about their back pay. She is still waiting on her own unpaid salary, amounting to 250,000 rupees ($2,860).

When the first round of layoffs happened in January 2023, Sarthak Gandhi, then a lead developer at Dunzo, saw it as a routine restructuring. But in April, “a lot of senior folks went, like whole verticals were shut down and in the All-Hands [meeting], we got to know they even reduced the number of dark stores,” Gandhi, who had joined Dunzo as a consultant in 2020, told Rest of World.

After the next round of cuts in July and September, Gandhi and most of his peers and managers were let go. He was only a month away from his wedding. Naveen Meka, a Hyderabad-based supply lead who joined Dunzo in 2019, was laid off around the same time. He wrote WhatsApp messages and emails to the company’s leadership, begging for his unpaid wages so he could pay his children’s school fees, but nothing came of it.

“It’s a big, big pain during that time for multiple employees, not only me,” Meka told Rest of World.

By August 2024, a skeleton crew of 50-odd employees was retained just to keep things running, reports suggested.

In early January this year, Reliance wrote off its $200 million investment. Soon after, Biswas reportedly joined the Walmart-owned Flipkart to head its new quick-commerce segment, Minutes.

Meanwhile, Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart — the three market leaders that control 80% of India’s burgeoning quick-commerce industry — have each set up more than 1,000 dark stores.

“This business is all about the execution. [It] has to be top-notch,” Elara Capital’s Taurani said. “You need to have the best people, best technology offering, best assortment. It’s not only about the investment.”

As Tesla’s existing markets give it the cold shoulder, it is turning to India after a decade of false starts.

Days after Elon Musk met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, Tesla reportedly leased a sprawling showroom in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, for five years, forking out $446,000 in rent for the first year. Plans for a second showroom in Delhi are in the works. The company is also hiring for nearly two dozen roles in India across customer support, sales operations, and product development. Indians — who, until last year, were chasing the company for refunds on unfulfilled pre-bookings from 2016 — may finally get to claim their electric car of choice.

“Everyone is excited to get their hands on a Tesla,” Nikhil Chaudhary, a 25-year-old computer science student who runs Tesla Club India, an online community with nearly 20,000 enthusiasts on X, told Rest of World.

In February, Tesla’s sales slumped in the U.S., Australia, China, and several European countries. The fall was precipitous in some markets, including Germany, where sales collapsed by 76% last month, and Italy, where Tesla registered a 55% drop. Rising competition along with Musk’s support of the U.S. government and far-right leaders in Europe are among the reasons for Tesla’s poor performance, which led to an $800 billion erosion in its market capitalization.

“Every major company is interested in the Indian market,” Biswajit Dhar, an economics professor who has worked on the multilateral trading system for several decades, told Rest of World. “Tesla’s sales have been declining — and what better opportunity to make it up than investing in India?” Tesla did not respond to queries relating to its entry in the country.

In India, the world’s third-largest auto market, the government has targeted 30% EV adoption by 2030, and the race to go electric is gaining momentum. But Tesla will have to contend with established local players, pricing pressure, and infrastructural gaps, experts told Rest of World.

Electric car sales in India rose 20% year on year in 2024. The market is, however, small: EVs comprised only 2.5% of the 4.3 million cars sold in the country last year. India’s EV market is estimated to be worth $54.41 billion, and expected to reach $111 billion by 2029.

Domestic automobile giant Tata Motors commands 60% of the electric car market in India, followed by JSW MG Motor India — a joint venture between India’s JSW Group and China’s SAIC Motor — and Indian automobile manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra. The companies offer a range of affordable EV car options in the price-sensitive Indian market.

While Tesla has not yet disclosed its India pricing, automobile experts estimate the company’s cheapest car, the Model 3, would cost around $40,000, excluding tariffs. This is significantly higher than “mass-market models available in India,” Kwan Wongwetsawat, a senior auto analyst at the research firm GlobalData, told Rest of World. Tata’s and MG Motors’ most affordable offerings sell at less than $10,000.

Everyone is excited to get their hands on a Tesla.

Electric cars in the premium range, priced at over $20,000, accounted for only 6.6% of the EVs sold in India last year. The country is grappling with widening income inequality — 90% of its population has no money to spend on non-essential items, according to a study by venture capital firm Blume Ventures.

Musk’s electric cars will initially be “a status symbol for fairly well-off, maybe tech-oriented, and business-anchored crowd in the large cities,” David Bach, president of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, who has studied Tesla’s global expansion, told Rest of World.

Tesla “is likely to have some impact on the luxury BEV [battery electric vehicle] segment, particularly affecting entry-level models from Mercedes-Benz and BMW,” Wongwetsawat said. Tesla could follow its approach in markets such as Germany, where it entered with luxury models, “established the brand, became desirable,” and then introduced more affordable variants, said Bach.

“Essentially you start with exports, then you open a local factory, you benefit from policies for locally manufactured EVs, and suddenly your market share increases dramatically,” he said.

The existing design of Tesla’s cars is ill-suited to India’s uneven roads, experts said, as most of its models have low clearance, which means the vehicles’ bottommost part is close to the ground.

India’s geopolitical tensions with China may work to Tesla’s benefit.

Unlike other Asian markets, where Chinese EVs are establishing dominance, Tesla has a “clear white space in India, because there are not many Chinese [automakers] in India, and even if they are, they are not able to invest in India because of the government policy,” Puneet Gupta, who leads the India and Southeast Asia teams at automotive intelligence firm S&P Global Mobility, told Rest of World. In 2023, the Indian government rejected the Chinese auto giant BYD’s proposal to establish a $1 billion factory for electric cars and batteries.

Musk’s perceived proximity to U.S. President Donald Trump will likely help, too, Dhar said.

India has already made a policy change that makes it easier for Tesla to enter and operate. Until last year, the country levied a 110% import duty on all cars. The Indian government then reduced import duty on fully assembled EVs that cost more than $35,000 to 15% for 8,000 units a year. Manufacturers, however, have to commit to investing at least $500 million and establishing local production within three years.

Trump, who thinks Musk building a factory in India would be “unfair” to the U.S., has complained about the tariffs on car imports. He has demanded that they be brought to zero, threatening reciprocal action if India does not change course.

India will try its best, everything that it can, to please the U.S. administration and Elon Musk.

In a bid to avoid trade conflicts with the U.S., the Modi government is “extending certain special favors to Tesla,” said Dhar, who has led India’s multilateral treaty negotiations, including with the World Trade Organization. “This will be a part of that larger strategy. India will try its best, everything that it can, to please the U.S. administration and Elon Musk.”

Last week, Musk’s satellite internet firm, Starlink, announced its long-delayed India entry through a partnership with two major telecom players, Airtel and Jio.

Meanwhile, Trump, who rallied against EVs until a couple of years ago, showcased a Tesla purchase at the White House and declared any violence against a Tesla dealership an act of domestic terrorism.

Musk’s “political activities are directly impacting his companies by removing his focus from them, by alienating significant swathes of potential customers, and by puncturing the halo of genius surrounding him that has been a major component of his companies’ extraordinary valuations,” Gautam Mukunda, an author and leadership expert who teaches at Harvard Business School, told Rest of World.

Tesla’s current crisis makes India a high-stakes gambit. “Tesla needs markets like India,” Gupta said, and there is no better time for the company to enter India than “when Trump is there in the center.”