Some Indian immigrants to the US are now returning to India and bringing US culture with them. This New York Times article reports:
Others have been drawn back by the tug of family and the almost atavistic pull of roots, or pushed by diminishing job opportunities in Silicon Valley and tightening Americans visa regulations.
Many of them are returning to communities like Palm Meadows, whose developer, the Adarsh Group, advertises “beautiful homes for beautiful people.” The liberalization of India’s state-run economy over the last 13 years has spawned a suburban culture of luxury housing developments, malls and sport utility vehicles that is also enabling India to compete for its Americanized best and brightest.
Godless comments:
A couple of thoughts…
Concerning brain drain: From our perspective, it makes sense to take the best minds from the developing world. The people arguing against this are usually those afraid of competition – not the consumers enjoying cheaper and better chips and software.
Furthermore, the secondary “welfare of the home country” argument doesn’t fly. The fact is that the countries most reputed to suffer from “brain drain” in the last few decades are the ones that are booming today: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, and China.
Lastly, only totalitarian states prevent emigration (leaving the country). Those people aren’t owned by the state. Should we have turned back the Russian defectors who came here during the Cold War? We could indeed prevent *immigration* of highly skilled engineers and physicists, but why would we want to? Every stat shows that they benefit the economy and rapidly integrate. Over half of US engineering doctorates are awarded to foreign students.
The contribution these engineers made to the US wasn’t a “short term” gain. The vast majority of those guys are still in the country – and the 90’s internet boom wouldn’t have happened without Indian and Chinese engineers. See Anna Lee Saxenian‘s stats on the proportion of Silicon Valley companies run or staffed by immigrant engineers:
[By 1998], ethnic Chinese and Indian immigrants run nearly 25% of the high-tech companies started in the Valley since 1980, according to the study by Anna Lee Saxenian, a professor of regional development at the University of California, Berkeley. The 2,775 immigrant-run companies had total sales of $16.8 billion and more than 58,000 employees last year. Ms. Saxenian says those figures likely understate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs, because many companies they started are run by native-born Americans.
Those figures are six years old, and don’t account for all the other companies staffed if not run by immigrant engineers. I remember seeing that the fraction is higher today (around 33%), but I need to find the source.
If these guys start software companies in India – fine. Competition is good for the consumer. The idea that we shouldn’t trade with the rest of the world or that it would even be possible to keep all the software innovation in the US is foolish. Would the millions of American auto consumers – as opposed to the thousands in the US auto industry – be better or worse off without the challenge from Japanese cars? The question answers itself.
Finally, I think the whole point of the article is that immigration law makes it difficult for skilled immigrants to gain residence – time limits on H1B’s with master’s degrees in CS are a reason most of them have gone back. In contrast, Bush + co. want to grant amnesty to millions of English-illiterate non-high school grads who are illegally in the country.
As I’ve said before, the immigration issue does not benefit from grouping legal computer programmers and illegal day laborers. The only thing they have in common is that they’re nonwhite.
Posted by TangoMan at 03:34 PM