Why're you back? The Indian dream beyond borders

Synopsis The trend of Indian emigration continues, driven by aspirations for better opportunities abroad. Despite improvements in India, many individuals still seek to leave the country. Historical patterns of migration are linked to economic conditions and personal ambitions. The allure of the United States remains significant for many professionals. However, immigration policies may restrict future movement and opportunities for those seeking success. Listen to this article in summarized format Listen ET Online Since I moved back to India, the question I get asked most, usually with a slightly puzzled look, is "Why did you come back?" It is asked as if living abroad had to mean leaving for good, and coming home needed explaining. In a much-shared thread on X earlier last month venture investor Deedy Das argued that "the smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US" because the economic incentives are far better. He listed close to twenty AI companies with at least one Indian-born founder, along with their valuations. In his telling, the only reasons to stay in India were family, a failed visa or "devout patriotism". What he says about AI founders is true. But it is true of almost any country when it comes to frontier technology (barring China, for reasons we don't need to go into here). A British, French or Brazilian founder feels exactly the same pull toward the US. What I doubt is that the debate is as charged anywhere else. In India it quickly takes on moral terms, and it can go in two opposite directions. One lens is ambition. If you are smart you leave, and anyone who stays is staying for sentimental reasons or because they couldn't make it. The other is nationalism. Why would you leave, rather than stay and do something for your country? Deedy's jibe about "devout patriotism" mocks the second. The patriotic framing, for its part, ignores the very real reasons life abroad is attractive. I don't find either very useful. Both barely scratch the surface of how complicated the decision to move is, for the people making it and for the country they leave. We have always moved In absolute terms India has the largest diaspora in the world, about 18.5 million people in 2024, according to UN data. As a share of the population, though, that is only about 1.3%. Of the 95 countries with more than 10 million people, India ranks 81st by the share of its people living abroad. The countries at the top of that list are mostly places people are fleeing. More than a third of Syrians live abroad, as do nearly 30% of Venezuelans and about a quarter of Ukrainians. After them come poorer countries next to much richer neighbors: about a quarter of Romanians, one in eight Poles and roughly 9% of Mexicans. The slice of India that Deedy is talking about is smaller still. About 3.2 million India-born people live in the US, which works out to roughly one Indian in 460. ET Bureau India has most people living abroad Despite this, moving abroad is nothing new for Indians. We have traveled to work and live abroad at scale for a very long time, despite the old taboo against crossing the kala paani, the belief that a Hindu who crossed the sea lost his caste. When a young Gandhi decided to sail to England in 1888, the head of his Modh Bania caste declared him an outcaste and said that anyone who helped him or saw him off at the dock would be fined. He sailed anyway. A lot of this movement followed trading routes. Gujarati, Konkani and Chettiar merchants built networks across the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Burma and Malaya, and once these regions became part of the Empire, these communities did very well out of the open borders that world gave them. Empire also moved people in far crueler ways. Indentured laborers from the Bhojpuri belt of Bihar and eastern UP were shipped to Suriname, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji and Mauritius. Punjabis, more worldly because of their military service, went to Canada, California and England. Many went abroad for education. The men who led our national movement were themselves migrants within the empire at one point or another. Gandhi spent two decades in South Africa. Nehru was schooled at Harrow and Cambridge, and Jinnah trained at Lincoln's Inn and later practiced in London. I suspect this long history is part of why we are so comfortable moving, and why we have diaspora networks to draw on. ET Bureau ...But only 1.3% Indians live abroad Independence changed the rules of the game. For two hundred years of Company and Crown rule, India had been part of a world of fairly open trade and movement, however unequal its terms. The new state cut itself off from much of that. It turned inward economically, and it kept Indians abroad at arm's length. In 1964 Nehru told the Rajya Sabha that the government's policy was to encourage people of Indian origin overseas to identify with the countries they had adopted. Emigration after independence happened in pockets. Britain tapped Indians for its postwar reconstruction. Men from Punjab, many of them uprooted by Partition, went to work in the iron foundries of the Midlands, the steelworks of Sheffield, the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and at Heathrow, according to Minority Rights Group. Britain also recruited doctors from the subcontinent to staff its new National Health Service, about 18,000 junior doctors in the 1960s alone. It was a very particular kind of migration, made up of workers and professionals filling gaps in a labor market that was short of hands. From the 1970s the oil boom pulled workers, many of them from Kerala, to the Gulf. America was barely open at all. A 1946 law allowed just 100 Indian immigrants a year, and when the US census counted its India-born population in 1960, it found only about 12,000 people in the whole country. That changed in 1965, when the US ended the national-origin quotas that had all but shut out Asians and began admitting skilled immigrants. In *The Other One Percent: Indians in America*, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh call this first wave the Early Movers. Between 1965 and 1979 about 12,000 India-born people arrived in the US each year, and 45% of them had, or later earned, graduate or professional degrees, especially in medicine. From the 1980s to the mid-1990s family reunification became the main route in, as their relatives followed. The authors explain why Indians in America have done so well through selection. They were filtered three times: first by a social hierarchy at home that largely restricted higher education to the better-off, then by an exam and fee system that narrowed the pool further, and finally by an American immigration system built to admit people who matched its high-end labor needs. Measured by college degrees, the India-born in the US were roughly three times as educated as Americans as a whole and nine times as educated as Indians back home. Households headed by an Indian immigrant had a median income of about $156,000 in 2023, according to Pew. ET Bureau Immigrations in US by country of birth Even so, the numbers stayed small. Getting a passport was at the government's discretion until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in 1967, and foreign exchange was tightly rationed. There was also a strong early sense that the brightest should stay and build the country. Creating a new nation does unleash a certain ambition in its people. I thought exactly this when I visited the exhibition *Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980* at MoMA in 2018. Whether it was building new cities, big dams, the IITs, steel plants or a space program, the pride and scale of building a new nation kept some of the brightest Indians at home. What 1991 changed What really changed the game was 1991. It was a moment of real renewal that in hindsight is second only to 1947, but a different kind of renewal. It unleashed individual ambition far more than it revived any shared nationa