H-1B Crackdown on Indian Workers Erodes a Texas Real Estate Boom

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For almost a decade, South Asians have been the driving force behind this region’s building boom, one of the biggest in the US during the pandemic. They once accounted for 70% of sales at Schneider’s Tradition Homes. But in the past year they’ve dropped below 30%, leaving his family-owned company with a backlog of 125 luxury properties to sell.

Since 2018 the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area has attracted more corporate headquarters relocations than anywhere else in the US, according to real estate company CBRE Group Inc., with manufacturing and tech firms leading the way. The influx drew thousands of software engineers and other Indian-born workers to the federal H-1B program, which provides temporary visas for professionals with corporate sponsors. For the most recently available four-year period, ended Sept. 30, 2024, the government granted almost 32,000 new H-1B approvals in the Dallas area, topping Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, DC, and trailing only the New York City metro area.

Visa holders flocked to the new subdivisions spreading north through the suburbs of Prosper, Frisco and, most of all, Celina, where the population more than tripled in just five years. That helped make Collin and Denton the fastest-growing US counties among those with a population of at least 1 million, the most recent census data show. Collin also had the biggest percentage jump in Indian residents among large counties, climbing to an average of more than 116,000 in the five years through 2024, from 70,000 in the preceding five years.

But the momentum is quickly reversing. Indian buyers are disappearing from the market as federal and state governments tighten H-1B restrictions and many of the tech companies that employed the new arrivals fire workers in favor of artificial intelligence. Prices in the Collin County suburbs north of Dallas in February dropped almost 9% from a year earlier, compared with a decline of 4% in the metro area as a whole, according to data from brokerage Redfin.

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{snip} In January, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies and public universities to freeze new H-1B petitions. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office began its own H-1B probe that month and expanded it in late April, issuing civil investigative demands to almost 30 North Texas businesses that the state suspects of fraud or abuse.

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As is often the case in boom-and-bust Texas, the region has become a laboratory for the impact of changing visa policy. The area has undergone one of the fastest demographic transformations in the nation. Indian families flooded in over the past decade, drawn by top-rated schools, mild weather (similar to Hyderabad’s) and proximity to the tech employers relocating to the corridor, as well as the pull of a growing South Asian community. In Frisco alone, where 235,000 people live about 30 miles north of downtown Dallas, the Indian share of the population ballooned from 6% in the 2010-14 period to about 20% a decade later, second only to White residents, who are no longer in the majority, according to census data.

Alongside the subdivisions came a cultural transformation so evident that Indian residents jokingly dubbed the area “Dallaspuram,” or Dallas village. Major League Cricket moved its headquarters to the Dallas suburbs as it sought to expand its following among South Asians. Temples and mosques have opened, sari shops and Indian street-food joints line strip malls, and local movie theaters devote multiple screens to Telugu- and Tamil-language blockbusters.

The influx has also led to friction, particularly among White residents dismayed at the area’s transformation from mostly rural farmland to a multicultural hub. At Frisco City Council meetings, activists now regularly denounce what they call an “Indian invasion,” accusing residents of H-1B fraud without any evidence and warning that the council will soon be entirely Indian. At one meeting a White man draped in an Indian flag introduced himself in a fake accent as “Sanjay Gupta,” before launching into a racist diatribe.

In nearby Irving, masked men held signs in a roadside protest in 2025: “Don’t India My Texas: Deport H-1B Visa Scammers.” {snip}

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