Donald Trump’s clampdown on H-1B is chilling places in Texas, and other parts of the country — and that may be the point.
Indian tech workers once charged home prices north of Dallas. Now they are gone – and the renovation of the houses is already underway.
For years, the neighborhoods north of Dallas have been ground zero for one of the most unusual homes in America. Subdivisions are multiple. Prices are rising. The builders could not erect the homes fast enough.
The engine behind it all was a wave of Indian-born H-1B visa workers flocking to high-tech jobs along the corporate corridor that attracted more corporate headquarters relocations than anywhere else in the country between 2018 and today, according to real estate firm CBRE Group.
Now that engine is exploding — and the White House might be okay with that.
President Trump’s sweeping cuts to the H-1B program, which provides temporary visas to highly skilled foreign workers, has helped trigger a price correction in one of the region’s hottest housing markets.
In Collin County — the epicenter of the boom — home prices fell nearly 9% year over year since February, more than double the 4% decline recorded in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, according to Redfin data.
The withdrawal of Indian buyers from the market, when there is a huge potential for new housing sales in the area, is starting to act as a release valve.
The scale of what is happening north of Dallas is hard to describe.
The federal government issued nearly 32,000 new H-1B permits in the Dallas area alone during the Biden administration — surpassing Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, DC, according to a Bloomberg investigation published this week, which cited data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Only the New York City metro area ranked higher.
Workers who arrived on those visas flocked to new sections in Prosper, Frisco and Celina, where the population has more than tripled in just five years.
Collin and Denton counties were the nation’s fastest growing among those with at least 1 million people, census data show.
The Indian-born population in Collin County is estimated to be 116,000 residents per year in the five years to 2024, up significantly from 70,000 in the previous five-year period.
In Frisco alone — a city of 235,000 residents about 30 miles north of downtown Dallas — the share of Indian residents has increased from about 6% in early 2010 to about 20% in the mid-2020s, census figures show.
Builders have prepared homes suitable for this customer. One North Texas builder, Zach Schneider of Traditional Homes, has designed model homes with north-facing “puja” rooms for Hindu prayer and optional “spice kitchens” for buyers from India.
In terms of demand, South Asians represent 70% of his company’s sales. At the beginning of this year, that number dropped to less than 30 percent, as it was still behind 125 luxury homes under construction.
The policy response from Washington was overwhelming. Trump raised minimum wage limits for H-1B workers, imposed new fees and ordered the program to prioritize higher-paid applicants. The Department of Labor launched “Project Firewall,” an enforcement program aimed at employer abuse of the visa program.
Then in September 2025, Trump signed an executive order capping $100,000 in new H-1B applications — a measure that effectively cost staffing companies and mid-sized technology contractors who were the biggest sponsors of Indian workers in markets like Dallas.
The Trump administration also ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to bar permanent residents, including H-1B visa holders, from accessing FHA-insured mortgages beginning May 25, 2025.
According to data from John Burns Research and Consulting, the share of FHA loan volume given to non-permanent residents fell from 6% in April to less than 1% in June – and nearly zero by late summer.
The policy change comes as it emerged that the H-1B electronic registration system was heavily manipulated by middlemen to increase the chances of selection. In one fiscal year, government data revealed that one person was registered by various companies 83 times, and more than 9,000 people registered more than five people each.
A Bloomberg analysis estimates that about 15,500 visas (about one in six awarded) were obtained during this period by labor companies that came together to use the lottery system.
At the state level, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a freeze on new H-1B petitions by state agencies and public universities in January. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched his own investigation into the program the same month, issuing civil suits against nearly 30 North Texas businesses accused of fraud or abuse.
The dynamics at play in Dallas offer a preview of what might happen in other tech-heavy metro areas where H-1B workers have long fueled housing demand.
About three-quarters of the H-1B workers approved in fiscal year 2023 were born in India, according to the Pew Research Center, making Indians a striking face of the program.
Disapproval rates peaked at 24% during Trump’s first term in 2018, dropped to 2% under Biden in 2021 and have been rising again under Trump’s second administration.
States most exposed to the policy change include New York and New Jersey, California, Washington, Virginia and Texas — all major H-1B-dependent technology industry hubs.
In markets like Seattle, where Amazon and Microsoft draw heavily on the visa pipeline, real estate analysts may see a 2% to 5% drop in crowded H-1B areas as new leases.
Florida International University professor Eli Beracha, who co-authored a 2025 paper on transportation and real estate markets published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, told Bloomberg that the downturn in fast-growing markets like Dallas could be worse than the beginning.
“These H-1B visas are the No. 1 converters of potential home buyers to actual buyers,” he said. “But if you get a few people who get H-1B visas, you get a nasty surprise right away because you have housing already built for those people who are sitting on the market.”
The pattern echoes moves by other governments around the world. Canada imposed a two-year break on international students in 2024 to ease housing pressures – and rents there are rising as a result. Spain has suspended its golden visa scheme for property buyers and Switzerland will hold a referendum this summer.
In the Mustang Lakes subdivision in Celina, Texas, Ravi Vavilala purchased a five-bedroom home in late 2023 for $895,000. The Indian-born citizen was fired from his IT job in March. He put the house on the market, dropped the asking price several times, and now it’s listed below what he paid for it at $873,000 – struggling to compete against the builder’s benefits offered down the road.
Before showing off again, Vavilala removed his religious items.
“Because the market is slow, I want to attract all kinds of buyers,” he told Bloomberg.
Real estate broker Neeraj Gupta, who came to Dallas on an H-1B visa in 2000 and spent two decades in IT before turning to real estate, said his phone — which used to ring constantly with buyers — is now ringing with sellers looking to cut their losses.
Some clients experience monthly rental losses of $300 to $1,500 while they wait for the market to turn.
“Some of them said, ‘I’ve seen enough: Just sell — I don’t care,'” he told Bloomberg.
One client, an IT executive who owns two homes in Frisco each worth more than $1 million, is thinking about moving back to India.
One financed an $800,000 home almost entirely with debt; the property is now worth less than the loan balance. “He will not lose anything,” said Gupta. “The banks will lose.”
Immigration attorney Sharadha Kodem, who practices in Frisco, said the client concerns she sees are unlike anything in her line of work. Many of his clients who bought from places as far away as Celina while working remotely are now being called back to the Dallas offices – or told to move to Seattle or San Francisco.
Those laid off have only 60 days to secure a new employer before their visa status expires.
“I have a few customers who are willing to go back, but the problem is they need more time to sell,” he said. “They have to keep paying the mortgage.”
Alex Barron, a housing analyst at the Housing Research Center LLC in El Paso, warned that the exodus of South Asian buyers is leaving a gap in the new home market without obvious replacements. “Who is there to take their place?” he told Bloomberg.
