On a Thursday morning in early February, Kartik Sivakumar realized that he would have to leave America. He was sitting in his dorm room, at the University of Iowa, where he was a senior majoring in neuroscience. He was also a resident adviser, a leader of the university's hospital student-volunteer corps, and an organizer of the Indian Student Alliance's annual dance competition. Sivakumar had lived in Iowa for half his life. That morning, he received an e-mail from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.), saying that action had been taken on his change-of-status application for a student visa.

Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and dreamed of creating a tech startup. "I had a zillion ideas," he tells me. But he'd been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties you to your employer. A green card that would make self-employment possible was years away. "It felt like shackles," he says.

President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on immigration reform. Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa says the RAISE Act could be good for the country. Editor's note: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa has appeared frequently on this page, most recently here. I was shooting with him just last week in and around his home in Palo Alto for a story on his new book, "The Driver in the Driverless Car," and his forecast of an imminent job crisis caused by high technology and what we as a society should do about it. And more to the point, high tech in the form his Tesla, which can already do a lot of the driverless driving, including parking itself in Vivek's garage by remote control -- somewhat haltingly -- as this brief 1:33 video clip demonstrates: An immigrant from India, Vivek has been a staunch -- some would say "strident" -- supporter of diversity, especially in high tech, where he has found it lamentably lacking with regard to both gender and race.

Visabot, the Facebook Messenger-based AI that helps users navigate the complex visa application process while skipping unnecessary fees, is expanding its assistance portfolio. For a $150 fee, it will walk users through filing for a green card and schedule appointments with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Like its previous system helping users through the visa process, Visabot's green card service walks people through a questionnaire and plugs the answers into appropriate forms. "We created our own immigration AI so our success rate grows as the bot learns," Visabot COO Andrey Zinoviev announced at VentureBeat's MB 2017 show. "What you need to do is answer'are you a us citizen' [and] other things you should know, and the bot will use this info to generate the whole package for you. All you have to do is file it with the US immigration services."

President Donald Trump's executive order barring citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries has prompted nationwide protests and led tech companies, including Amazon, to consider legal action because of potential business impacts. But for some tech companies around the world, the ban has already thrown operations into chaos. "Until the executive order, we didn't really care about who's from where or what religion they were, we didn't ask, but all these things have been a distraction and worrying," said Husayn Kassai, the CEO and co-founder of London-based startup Onfido. The company, which uses artificial intelligence to help clients carry out complex background checks, boasts a 145-person staff representing 41 different nationalities. Kassai was born in Manchester, U.K., but holds dual citizenship in Iran and the U.K.