From the article:
The lure of going to work in the US’ information technology (IT) sector is often blamed for causing a brain-drain in India but new research shows it helped power the country’s own IT boom, too.
As computer science-related occupations began to grow in the US in the nineties, the proportion of foreigners in the field grew from 9% in 1994 to 24% in 2012. That spurt was almost entirely driven by Indians drawn by the promise of higher wages for the same work. By 2014, 86% of computer science H-1B visas, used by US tech firms to bring in skilled labour from abroad, had been acquired by Indians, who became a useful pool of English-speaking and highly-skilled labour in an era of technological innovations and increasing software demand.
However, a paper published last month by researchers from the University of Michigan and the Center for Global Development, a Washington DC-based think tank, shows that as more Indian students enrolled in computer science programmes with the hope of working abroad, the cap on H-1B visas meant that many had to stay at home, helping India grow a skilled workforce of its own and boosting its IT sector. Moreover, Indians whose visas had expired after the six-year term often returned to the country, bringing back technological know-how and connections with them. As a result, the researchers say, the presumed brain-drain eventually alchemised into a brain-gain, with India overtaking the US when it came to software exports by 2005. The study used economic models that factored in college choices, wages, visa figures, and IT productivity, based on data from the start of the IT boom in 1994 to 2010.
“Because of the software boom in the US, coupled with its immigration policy, it became an incentive for Indians to acquire the computer science skills valued in the US,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the Center for Global Development who wrote the paper with Nicolas Morales. “If US immigration had been restricted in the 1990s, it would not have allowed the Indian IT sector to develop.”