Immigrants follow ambitions back to India, China

Kristin Collins - Staff Writer

Published: Tue, Mar. 03, 2009 12:30AM

tool name

Venu Venugopal thought he had it all: United States citizenship, a home in Chapel Hill and a high-level job in information technology.

Then last year, after more than two decades in his adopted country, he realized he could have even more in his native India. Venugopal, 45, now works for Cisco Systems in Bangalore.

The United States, many immigrants now say, is no longer the world's only land of opportunity.

Staff Photo by Takaaki Iwabu - Priya Mohanty, who came to Duke for a business degree, now thinks of returning to India for a good job after graduation.

A growing tide of highly skilled immigrants from India and China are doing what was once unthinkable -- returning to their home countries for the promise of better jobs and more lavish lifestyles.

People who fled impoverished socialist regimes in the 1980s and early 1990s are returning to countries exploding with economic growth -- fueled in part by American companies that have outsourced many of their high-level jobs. In these still-developing countries, executive salaries are enough to hire servants and chauffeurs and buy homes in exclusive communities.

"I was absolutely amazed at the energy of what was going on in India," said Venugopal, who left Chapel Hill in 2008 and now lives in a community where about a quarter of residents are returnees from the U.S. "The country I come back to now, I have everything I had in the United States, plus more."

The trend has become so pronounced that, this week, Duke University researcher Vivek Wadhwa released a study on the exodus. It is based on interviews with 1,200 highly educated Indian and Chinese professionals who returned to their countries -- most for better jobs and an increased standard of living.

Wadhwa said there is no way to track the number of immigrants who have left, but he said human resources managers in India and China report a tenfold increase in applicants seeking to return from the United States.

"For the whole of American history, immigrants have come here on one-way tickets, whether it was on the Mayflower or from India," Wadhwa said. "Now we're exporting our critical talent. The message here is, we better wake up. We have this arrogance as if we're still the only great place in the world."

Wadhwa, a professor in Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, said the growing job market in India and China, along with visa backlogs and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, is pulling immigrants back to the places they once thought they had left for good.

The pull is likely to get stronger as the U.S. economy sinks into recession while India and China -- flush with millions of young people and freer markets than they had in the past -- continue to grow. U.S. companies looking to save money are likely to continue creating jobs overseas.

Tech innovators

Wadhwa called it a frightening trend for the U.S., where immigrants have been key innovators. Immigrants held top positions in a quarter of all U.S. technology and engineering companies founded between 1995 and 2005 and helped create such firms as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo, Wadhwa said.

But immigration critics say the departure of immigrants will help American job seekers, especially in a time of rising unemployment.

"If these are good jobs, wouldn't we want them to go to Americans?" said Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies; the think tank in Washington pushes for stricter immigration limits.

Camarota said the wave of foreign engineers and scientists has depressed U.S. wages and discouraged Americans from going into those professions.

Sukesh Pai, 33, of Rolesville, left India in 1997 to earn a master's degree and build a career as a computer engineer. At that time, he said, immigration to the U.S. was considered the only option for ambitious young Indians. Returning was deemed a failure.

kristin.collins@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4881