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.
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.
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.
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 national project, and it arrived just as the world was globalizing faster than at any point since before the First World War.
For the ambitious Indian, several things came together at once to make America the natural place to realize that ambition. The US Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B visa and raised the number of employment-based green cards from 54,000 to 140,000 a year, just as American companies began scrambling for programmers. The IT boom and then Y2K turned that into a flood of demand, and Indian IT firms built whole businesses on sending engineers to client sites in the US. (I wrote about how Infosys built that model in "Source Code".)
At home, liberalization eased the old controls on foreign exchange and travel, and the rapid growth of private colleges multiplied the number of engineering graduates. Chakravorty, Kapur and Singh call the people who came after 1995 the IT generation. They arrived at about 65,000 a year on average, and at well over 120,000 a year by the end of the authors' study period. About three-quarters of the India-born people in the US arrived after the mid-1990s.
In 1960 Italy was the largest single source of immigrants in the US, with about 1.3 million people, followed by Germany, Britain and Mexico. There were just 12,000 or so Indians. By 2024 the Italian-born population had shrunk to under 300,000 and the German-born to about half a million, partly because older migrants died and partly because those countries got richer and their people stopped coming.
The India-born population had grown to 3.2 million, and almost all of that growth came after 1990. I think of this as a kind of relay. Each era of American immigration has had its dominant groups, which eventually stop coming and simply become American. The Italians and the Germans went that way. Indians may well be next, either because India gets richer or because America closes the door. The current backlash against H-1B workers suggests the second could come first.
The opening up of America was matched by a change at home. The middle class that liberalization created began to withdraw from public life. It moved its children to private schools, its parents to private hospitals and itself to gated colonies with their own generators and water tankers. Leaving the country was the last step of that withdrawal.
Ruchi Gupta of the Future of India Foundation has a useful way of putting this. After liberalization, she argues, the national project narrowed to individual economic aspiration, and people began to measure their own lives against the most visible lifestyles in India and abroad. Social media makes the comparison worse, because it presents exceptional success as ordinary life. Deedy's thread is a good example: a list of exceptional outcomes offered as the normal path for anyone smart.
It also explains, I think, where the two moral framings I started with come from. When the national project was a collective one, leaving looked like desertion, and that is where the language of the brain drain and of patriotism comes from. Once the project became individual advancement measured against a global benchmark, moving to where that benchmark lives became the fullest way of meeting it.
That is why America dominates how we talk about emigration, even though it is not where most Indians go. The UAE has as many Indian emigrants as the US, about 17% each, and the Gulf as a whole has nearly half. But the money and the status run the other way. In 2023–24 the US was the single largest source of remittances to India, at 27.7%, against 38% for all six Gulf states put together. And the faces of Indian success abroad, from Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to Indian-American politicians on both sides of the aisle, are almost all Indian Americans.
We don't celebrate M.A. Yusuff Ali, whose LuLu Group runs hundreds of hypermarkets, supermarkets and malls across the Gulf, in the same way. Nor do we celebrate Ravi Pillai, who started a construction firm in Saudi Arabia and built the RP Group, which reportedly employs more than 70,000 people, or Azad Moopen, who founded the hospital chain Aster DM Healthcare. All three appear on lists of the Gulf's most successful Indians, and they are arguably bigger entrepreneurial successes than many of the founders we do celebrate (or perhaps that is why). Part of the reason is that the Gulf offers no real way to stay. Indians can live and work there for decades without any prospect of becoming citizens. The Gulf is still seen to offer wages, while America offers what it offers best: the possibility of the American dream.
Where from here?
Here is the irony. India is much better off than it was in 1991, and yet more people want to leave. Some of that is normal. In a well-known 2014 paper, the economist Michael Clemens found that emigration from poorer countries usually keeps rising as they get richer, because more people can afford to go abroad, and only starts to fall once incomes reach somewhere around $6,000–8,000 a head in purchasing-power terms. Measured at market exchange rates, India's income is only about $2,700 a head. But rupees buy far more in India than the same money would in America, so economists also measure income at "purchasing-power parity", which adjusts for what things actually cost in each country. On that basis India is at about $10,000 a head. Clemens's figures are in older prices, so the comparison is rough, but it suggests we are probably somewhere near the top of that curve.
That doesn't change the underlying fact that a lot of the desire to leave comes from prosperity not keeping pace with aspiration, or with the jobs and daily life that people now expect. Our corporate working culture is exhausting, and daily life in our cities is hard. It's hard to begrudge anyone wanting to leave that. Gupta also argues that national pride is a weak answer to personal stagnation when some people get prosperity and others only get reflected glory. When the country's achievements don't feel like they relate to you, getting out is a perfectly rational response.
In some ways the bigger loss for the country is not that someone who wants to be the next Sundar Pichai leaves for California. The top 1% of the 1% gravitate to the best opportunities, and this is true of any country. The sad thing is that a driver, a plumber or an electrician cannot get the dignity of decent, steady work at home. We need more of all of them, and more factory workers too, and that kind of work is simply not being created in enough places at wages people can build a life on. The engineer in Seattle and the electrician in Riyadh are responding to the same failure, even if they are rungs apart.
I don't think leaving is the proof of ambition that Deedy's thread makes it out to be, and I don't think it is a betrayal either. It is a decision people make based on what is on offer at home, and what is on offer can change. Right now it is not changing fast enough. The 1991 reforms have largely run their course, and the next round has never arrived with anything like the same force. Meanwhile the door that 1991 opened abroad, above all to America
