Social Pull
- Quality of life was cited as main reason for coming back
- Many felt emotional growth and education of children was better in India than in the US
- Being close to family, caring for aging parents a strong factor
- Family values and cultural assimilation better in India
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Professional Pull
- A majority believe India has better career opportunities than US
- Many have moved up professionally after coming back to India
- Financial compensation in relation to cost of living is better in India
- Growing demand for their skills in India was a big factor prompting them to return home
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The rapid decline of the economy in the US has accelerated the departure of science & technology workers of Indian nationality from that country to India.
| | | | Demand for their skills, better opportunities and comparable lifestyles are bringing techies back to India from the US, something India must cash in on. | | | | |
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As far as science & technology students of Indian nationality studying there go, the economic malaise is causing most of them to return home on graduation rather than follow the usual path of locating a position in the US. The statistics on these concurrent and related trends is difficult to obtain as no government agency specifically tracks returnees. However, anecdotal evidence in the Indian technology community, both in the US and abroad, strongly suggests the exodus is accelerating rapidly.
We have seen this trend play out with engineering students at Duke University, where I am a professor. In 2004, when I joined Duke University's masters of engineering management programme, almost all foreign students enrolled there said they planned to stay in the US to work for several years. Today, the majority of members of the class of 2009 intend to return immediately to their home countries. All the Indians, who constitute a considerable percentage of this group, are planning to return home. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the students are among the tens of thousands of Indian nationals abandoning the US as H-1B visa jobs disappear and employment prospects dim in America.
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A Step Above
Comparing current employment in India with previous US job, respondents rated the advantages
1 star: Much better in the US; 5 stars: Much better in India
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It is important to note, however, that the state of the US economy is only the straw that broke the camel's back. Other changes, including growing waiting times for permanent visas, improved career prospects and rising standards of living in India all contributed equally to the ultimate decision to depart. Over the course of the past two years, my research team at Duke surveyed over 500 Indians who had worked or studied in the US but returned home. Returnees moved to the Unites States for educational and career opportunities. Ironically, the majority of returnees listed professional advancement and career opportunities as significant reasons to return to India.
In the survey, 79 per cent of Indians cited growing demand for their skills in their home country as a major factor in their decision to return, a finding consistent with higher levels of science & technology activity in India. Even more important, returnees stated that India provided much better career opportunities for them than America. In fact, more than twice as many respondents in the survey held senior executive jobs in India than they did in the US, another indication that a move home afforded them better prospects of upward professional mobility.
A minority percentage of Indian respondents listed visa issues as the major reason for their departure. However, many of the students I speak to now are returning home in part due to lack of jobs but also, they say, because they were not able to obtain H-1B visas. By our estimates, hundreds of thousands of Indian nationals holding H-1Bs, and their families, are waiting for permanent resident status in the US. Many of them will need to wait for over a decade before receiving a yes-or-no answer, a process fraught with uncertainty related to the political climate. During this time, H-1B holders suffer under restrictive travel rules that make it hard to go in and out of the US for work or to see family.
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More Doors To Advancement
Professional opportunities in respondents' view (in percentage)
Homebodies
Would return if offered permanent residency and suitable job in the US?
Yes: 22.9%
No: 39.8%
Maybe: 37.3%
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It is our opinion that, while returnees surveyed may not have cited visas as a significant factor, their return more likely reflected the sad realisation that chances of obtaining a visa for permanent residency in a timely manner were so low as to not even make for serious consideration.
Beyond career and visa concerns, quality of life showed up in our surveys as yet another major factor driving Indians to return home. A majority of the Indian respondents believed that quality of life in India was on par with the quality of life in the US, but relative purchasing power was superior at home—a major advantage. Healthcare was not a big dividing factor, which is another sign of the advancement of science and technology in India, making middle-class living in a more comparable range to that enjoyed by middle-class families in the developed world.
Overwhelmingly, survey respondents indicated that another set of key factors driving their decision to return home was their desire to be closer to friends, to enjoy their native culture and provide care for aging parents. Over 85 per cent of Indian returnees said India provided better opportunities to care for their parents than America.
The tens of thousands of Indians returning home will provide an invaluable economic and intellectual stimulus to India's economy, which will likely be through innovation. Jennifer Hunt of McGill University and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle of Princeton University analysed long-term changes in the US population in a paper published in January 2009, titled 'How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?'. They calculated that, for every percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the US population, the total per capita number of patents for the entire population should increase by six per cent.
Indian immigrants occupy a disproportionately large share of science and engineering jobs in the US. So the statistical impact of their return home in terms of patent augmentation could conceivably be even greater. Likewise, Indian students in the US occupy a far greater percentage of seats in science and engineering curricula than their percentage of the total student population. These science and engineering students are the future innovators, future patent-holders and future entrepreneurs of the world.
The obvious conclusion from all this is that India will potentially enjoy an enormous intellectual windfall from returnees with expertise in the field of science & technology. How much of a boost they will give to the Indian economy is hard to predict right now. But suffice it to note, by way of example, that it only took two smart engineers to found Google and distribute billions of dollars in wealth in a very concentrated part of California via the public offering, charitable donations, and payments of salaries and wages. So the greater number of potential Larry Page and Sergey Brin candidates living in India, the greater the chances that a Google redux comes to pass on the subcontinent.
(The author is a senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and executive-in-residence at Duke University. His report, 'America's Loss is the World's Gain', on US immigrants returning to India and China, was released on March 2.)