How the H-1B Visa Built Ro Khanna's District
California's 17th district is now majority foreign-born and holds the largest Indian-American population of any district on the mainland. It is the H-1B district, and it elected an H-1B-era progressive.
- Origin
- India
- Pathway
- U.S.-born (2nd gen)
- Citizenship
- U.S.-born citizen
- Religion
- Hindu
- Caucus
- Progressive Caucus
- First elected
- 2016
Key Findings
California's 17th congressional district, which covers Cupertino, Fremont, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and parts of San Jose and Santa Clara, was 50.4% foreign-born as of 2024. It holds the largest Asian-American population of any district outside Hawaii and the largest Indian-American population of any district in the country.
That concentration is the product of the H-1B visa, created by the Immigration Act of 1990. Silicon Valley is the single largest destination for H-1B workers, and India supplies about 70% of the program's recipients.
The district elected Ro Khanna, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. His DW-NOMINATE first-dimension score is −0.458 and his Heritage Action score is 26%, both consistent with reliably liberal voting.
The sequence is the argument: a visa category written in 1990 reshaped a county's population over three decades, and the new electorate elected a representative aligned with it. The demographic change came first.
California's 17th congressional district is one of the few in the country where most residents were born in another country. As of 2024, 50.4% of its people were foreign-born.[1] No mainland district has a larger Asian-American population, and none has a larger Indian-American population.[1]
This is the district that the H-1B visa built.
A county remade in thirty years
The Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B program. It set aside tens of thousands of visas each year for workers in "specialty occupations," and the technology industry became its largest user. India supplies roughly 70% of all H-1B recipients.[2] The visas flow to where the jobs are, and the jobs are in Santa Clara County.
The demographic effect was concentrated and fast. Santa Clara County's Asian share rose from under one in five residents in 1990 to roughly two in five by 2020.[5] Cupertino and Fremont became majority-Asian cities. The district that now sends a representative to Washington did not exist in its current form before the visa category that populated it.
This is the pattern the Nation of Settlers documents across the demographic record. Volume and concentration change a place. A district that absorbs a large, geographically clustered immigrant population over thirty years does not vote the way it did before.
The representative the district produced
Ro Khanna was born in Philadelphia in 1976. His parents had immigrated from Punjab, India, in 1968, and his maternal grandfather had been part of the Indian independence movement.[6] Khanna is a product of the first wave of post-1965 Indian immigration, raised by it and representing the district that the later H-1B wave created.
He has represented the 17th since 2017. He sits in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, co-chaired a national presidential campaign on the party's left, and has built a national profile around an expansive economic agenda. His voting record matches the affiliation. His DW-NOMINATE first-dimension score is −0.458, and his Heritage Action score is 26%.[3][4] Both place him well to the left of the House center.
There is nothing unusual in a representative reflecting his constituents. That is what representation is. The point is narrower and it is about cause. The 17th did not elect a progressive because Silicon Valley was always going to. It elected one after a federal visa program filled the district with a new population over three decades, and the politics followed the people.
A pattern across districts
Khanna is one case in a consistent series. Across the high-immigration districts, the same relationship holds: the larger the foreign-born share, the more reliably liberal the representation. The 17th sits near the top of that distribution because its foreign-born share sits near the top.
The 1990 Act set this in motion. It tripled legal admissions, created the H-1B visa, and launched the Diversity lottery, and it did so without revisiting how a district of that composition would eventually vote. Congress debated it as a labor and visa bill. The electoral consequence arrived later, district by district, and no Congress since has treated the admission level as the political decision it is.
What follows
A serious immigration policy treats the scale of admissions as a decision the country makes deliberately, with its long-run effects on the table. That means lower and more sustainable legal immigration, an H-1B program restricted to genuinely exceptional skills rather than used as a volume pipeline, and an honest accounting of how a visa category written in 1990 reshaped the map.
The 17th district is not an argument about any individual. It is a record of what happens when a single program concentrates a large population in one place over thirty years. The other case studies in this series tell the same story in different districts.
Sources
- Data USA, Congressional District 17, California (American Community Survey) - 50.4% foreign-born; largest Asian-American and Indian-American population of any mainland district
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, H-1B Employer Data Hub; Pew Research Center, "Key facts about the U.S. H-1B visa program" - technology industry as the largest user; India as the source of roughly 70% of recipients
- DW-NOMINATE first-dimension scores, voteview.com - Ro Khanna −0.458
- Heritage Action Scorecard - Ro Khanna 26%
- U.S. Census Bureau, Santa Clara County, California (QuickFacts and decennial census) - Asian share of the county population over time
- Congressman Ro Khanna, official biography, U.S. House of Representatives - born in Philadelphia in 1976 to parents who immigrated from Punjab, India, in 1968