Can Indians still own a piece of the American Dream?

America, hailed the world over as a country of opportunities that embraces talent, has suddenly become a nation of anxious, fragile dreams for Indian students as employment opportunities become scarce and the government turns protectionist.

Sonia Shah busted into the boys’ club with an MBA degree from an Ivy League college. She had every reason to expect an easy passage into a Wall Street career, lavish bonuses, dinners at Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Grill and late-night rides home passed out in a Manhattan Town Car.   

But life is stranger than fiction. Shah lost her high-paying bank job even before she could test out her office chair. Bank of America Corp, the biggest US bank, recently withdrew 50 job offers it had made to foreigners holding MBAs. Shah was one of the casualties.    
Financial institutions like the Bank of America which have used funds from the government’s Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) are now restricted from applying for H1-B visas for foreign workers.
Unfortunately, the top H1-B visa sponsors are the same banks that got TARP money. They had the expensive legal counsel to handle the bureaucracy of the H1-B visa process.

“The H1-B visa hitch makes it much harder to get a job — and it was bad enough in this dismal market,” said Shah, who is currently on a J-1 student visa. She is back to pounding the pavement after the Bank of America debacle and is targeting the consultancy firms which are not struggling under TARP. 

“I have to get my act together,” says Shah who is living on the cheap on Mars bars and camping on friends’ couches in Manhattan. “I am hoping to get an interview with Booz Allen Hamilton next week.” 

$120,000 student loans
New York is teeming with freshly-minted Indian MBAs like Shah who are saddled with $120,000 student loans. She paid $86,000 for tuition over two years and $34,000 towards food, rent, laptop, books and medical insurance. Repayment shouldn’t have been a worry for Shah. After all, graduates like her from A-list B-schools like Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Chicago, Kellogg, Stern, Sloan and Darden scored starting salaries of $92,000 last year with bonuses.

But the realities of the recession are creating a different environment for jobseekers from India. Many Americans are less favourably disposed towards immigrants. And rising unemployment is hardening attitudes.

For students with young families, the pressure can be intense. “I applied for nearly 300 jobs,” says Rohit Sahu, an engineering PhD student at Duke University, who is in the midst of a wide-ranging job search that so far has produced no offers.

He feels responsible not only for himself but for his three-month-old daughter and wife. He says it will be easy to dismiss his American odyssey as a failure and that’s what many will do. “I have decided to move back to India,” said Sahu who juggled his course work and job search with a long-distance relationship with his wife and child in Jamshedpur.

Out of the more recent Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) graduates — including the Class of 2008 — 84% have chosen to remain in India, according to a survey by business research company Evalueserve.

But every third alumnus of the IITs went abroad from 1964 to 2001, mostly to the US. The American Dream that anybody can make it in the US through hard work had a hold over the Indian psyche for many years. Of course, India-educated stars like Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Vikram Pandit of Citi Bank and legions of Silicon Valley millionaires like Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla embodied the ultimate American Dream.

But US immigration bureaucracy and protectionism is now rattling Indian students. Academics in the US say that making it harder to hire foreigners is not good economic policy, but short-sighted xenophobia as the US will need them again when the economy turns up.

“America is the top destination for foreign students, but if they get the signal that the US doesn’t want them, then they will head to the United Kingdom and Australia,” Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University adjunct professor who conducts research into the immigrant jobs market, told DNA.

“Foreign students have to be able to work in the US after their graduation to pay back their student loans,” he added.

Internships dry up too
Wadhwa, who is also a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, said foreign students were not even scoring unpaid summer internships.  “College students are just not getting placed in internships. There are no jobs. Even students in Harvard who normally get their pick are struggling to find jobs,” said Wadhwa.

Advaitha Arunkumar, a first year MBA student at Fordham University, says; “I don’t know a single Indian student in my college who has an internship. Companies feel there is no point training them if they can’t be recruited because of visa hassles.”

Four academics including Wadhwa have written a report, called “Losing the World’s Best and Brightest,” that warns that “the departure of these foreign nationals could represent a significant loss for the US science and engineering workforce, where these immigrants have played increasingly larger roles over the past three decades.”

Wadhwa says, very few foreign students would like to stay in the US permanently; only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese, and 15% of Europeans. He said 45% of Indian, 40% of Chinese, and 30% of European students wanted to return home within five years.

Meanwhile, some feel they have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wish in America. Barkha Kumar, a third-year engineering student in Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York enjoys a $33,000 full-tuition scholarship. She also has a summer internship at Swiss bank UBS AG. “It’s been much harder than I thought it would be. But I was lucky to get an internship offer from two Swiss banks.  The Swiss banks can still sponsor H1-B visas,” said Kumar.

She says; “These are tough times for the American Dream but the lure of education in the US is still very powerful.”

Some names have been changed on request.