Brain wave

He is here somewhere, hidden in a throng of bleary undergrads and Palo Alto ladies with sunglasses as big as fishbowls. Beautiful machines slide in and out of the shopping centre’s parking lot, their purring engines a paean to balmy Saturday mornings and money to spend. Then I see him, resting lean and languid against a white Camry.

Gaurav Rajani landed on the California coast in 2002, riding a shining wave of Indian immigration. It wasn’t the first of its kind. For decades, those swells traversed the Pacific, smashed to rolling white breakers south of San Francisco. India’s best and brightest swept inland and helped turn a valley full of orchards to Silicon.

And Silicon turned to gold, as baby-faced kings with Coke-bottle glasses made millions overnight. At 22, Gaurav left the noise and squalour of Mumbai far behind. He started out as a lonely grad student, baffled that a few bananas could cost a whole dollar. But soon he found himself breathing the rarefied air of Google, high-tech’s Shangri-La. He put down roots and thrived, grew his hair long, bought a Prius.

They kept coming to the Bay, men and women just like him, drawn to the universities’ regal gates, the salaries unimaginable in India, and the chance to work on technology’s cutting edge. By 2005, more than half of all the engineers in Silicon Valley were foreign-born, and a full quarter of those were Indian.

But times are changing. American jobs for American workers! cry the protectionists, as they always do when the going gets tough. Go back to where you came from! cry modern-day Know Nothings, as they always do when people are scared enough to listen.
And for the first time in American history, the immigrants are going back, by the tens of thousands. Some go by choice, as India’s pull grows stronger by the day. Some — casualties of contracting payrolls and unforgiving visas — have no choice. To Delhi, to Bangalore, to Chennai trickles the lifeblood of innovation.

Entrepreneurship
Gaurav came to America for the same reason more than 70,000 Indians do every year — to study at the best universities in the world. He was accepted to the University of Southern California’s graduate programme in computer science — one of the country’s finest.

Gaurav joined Google two years after graduation, but jumped ship a year later and carved out a niche at WebJuice, a small South Bay tech firm. The gourmet lunches were hard to give up, but he’d found that the energy and pace of the startup world were a better fit for his personality.

Gaurav is a laid-back guy, his speech pattern infused with enough dudes, mans, and sweets to make him sound from time to time like a Santa Barbara surf bro with an Indian accent. Don’t be fooled, though: He’s smart, scrappy, and full of  passion. He also has a few ideas for businesses of his own, though he’s playing those close to the vest.

It could be that startups are in Gaurav’s blood. For hundreds of years, from the West Indies to Uganda to New Jersey, the entrepreneurial gumption of the Indian diaspora has helped kick-start stagnant economies. Most recently, it’s been Silicon Valley’s turn. (See box: ‘Tide turns’).

“I don’t think of myself as Indian, and I don’t think of myself as American,” Gaurav tells me, without a trace of self-righteousness. “I mean, I happen to be an Indian national, but I think it’s time for our generation to be truly global citizens.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but his passport tells another story. Just a month before I met him, as the economy went from bad to worse, Gaurav was laid off. He lost his visa along with his job, which means he has a few months to find something new before he’s forced to pack his bags. That’s half the time it can take a tech company to hire a new employee.

An antiquated visa policy and the worst job market in memory have sown the seeds of uncertainty. For the first time, many Indian immigrants are asking a question their predecessors never would have: Why stay? Without green cards or citizenship, they’re discovering that the lives they’ve carved out for themselves and their families are subject to a jittery economy.

“What America’s basically saying is, ‘We’ve educated you, we’ve trained you, we’ve taught you all about our markets’,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a successful Indian-born tech entrepreneur turned Duke University professor, and the leading US expert on Indian immigration. “‘Now you have to get the hell out of here. Go out and become our competitors’.”

Silicon Valley’s growth
You don’t have to look too far back in Silicon Valley’s history to find its Made in India pedigree. Relative to demand, “the supply of native-born engineers began to dry up in the ’80s and early ’90s,” says Anna Lee Saxenian, a UC Berkeley professor who has coauthored several groundbreaking studies on the Bay Area’s immigrant entrepreneurs.

“The fact that there were large numbers especially of Chinese and Indian graduate students in engineering and computer science at universities around the country allowed employers to keep growing by sucking them into the US  job market.”

Those students did more than program and compute — they innovated. In 1982, when Google’s Larry Page was still climbing jungle gyms, Vinod Khosla cofounded Sun Microsystems with a handful of guys from Stanford and Berkeley. Oracle bought their brainchild last April for $7.4 billion, and Khosla is now one of the most influential green venture capitalists in the world.

Sabeer Bhatia, another Stanford grad, founded Hotmail in 1996, which Microsoft bought a year later for $400 million. It’s still the world’s second-largest email provider. It’s no wonder that in 2000, Bay Area VC colossus Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers told a Time reporter that 40 per cent of its portfolio was invested in companies either founded or managed by Indians. “This is essentially how Silicon Valley grew,” says Saxenian.

Because of their educational and tech backgrounds, most Indian immigrants working in the US have had special recognition — of a sort. The government can designate them as ‘skilled workers’, which results in a different visa classification (H-1B) from, for example, that of a Guatemalan agricultural worker (H-2A). Google and WebJuice both sponsored an H-1B for Gaurav, which guaranteed him a spot in the US for as long as he kept his job.

The terms of the visas are restrictive, but that’s not the worst of it. In 2004, Congress cut the annual H-1B quota by two-thirds, to 65,000, its original level back in 1992. More recently, Congress tacked a provision onto the stimulus bill barring companies that receive bailout money from hiring foreigners through the H-1B programme if they replace American workers. The protectionist message seems to be getting through.

In 2008, the government got more than 65,000 applications on the first day of submissions. This year, it took four months for 45,000 to come in. In the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, you can’t just snap your fingers and find another job when a Valley startup goes bust or an industry giant starts shedding staff. Even those who will ride out the recession unscathed face a daunting prospect: There are an estimated one million skilled workers (many holding H-1Bs) and their family members queued up for a paltry 120,000 green cards. They may wait as long as six years for the elusive passkey that will make this country theirs for good.

As a result, many of America’s greatest minds are being forced to leave, or at least to think about their lives in the US in new terms. In the last 20 years, Wadhwa has found, 50,000 Indians and Chinese have left the US for their home countries. He thinks that’s just the shifting of loose rock before the mudslide.

“We’ll lose 100,000 more Indians in the next three to five years,” Wadhwa says. “The vast majority are very well educated.” Without that talent, Silicon Valley may need to start replanting some apricot trees.

In Wadhwa’s survey of 1,203 immigrants who had either worked or studied in the US and then decided to return to their home countries, almost a third  of the Indian returnees said visa issues were a significant factor in their decision to leave. Nearly two-thirds, however, cited something else, a rationale you wouldn’t have heard 10 years ago: “better career opportunities at home.”

“In the past, America could afford to be arrogant,” says Wadhwa. “The difference is that for the first time in history, you can be successful anywhere in the world. You can be more successful in Bangalore and Beijing than you can be in Boston.”

India shining
These days, if you want to live in Central Park, you don’t have to be homeless — at least, not in India. The emerald core of New York City shares its name with an exclusive residential complex in Delhi. In cities across India, gated communities have sprung up. They offer all the amenities of Western life without the hassle of a 6,000-mile relocation.

“They’re as good as anything you see in Los Gatos or Woodside,” says Seshan Rammohan, a Minnesota Gopher who left India 40 years ago. He was a charter member of Silicon Valley’s chapter of Indus Entrepreneurs, the largest entrepreneurial organisation in the world, and now directs the India Community Center in Milpitas. Today, he points out, the best neighborhoods in India’s cities boast shopping malls, gyms, and restaurants.

It’s all a product of what many Indians simply call “the Boom”. India’s economy is now the 12th largest in the world, as measured by GDP, and the third-fastest-growing in the G20 countries. As a result, Indians no longer have to leave the country for a little peace and quiet and an address in a leafy suburb.

In the past, American companies didn’t have to be creative to attract top talent from India. A pile of cash and a sponsored visa were enough to lure the best engineers. But now, given a narrowing salary gap and a lower cost of living, a top tech worker in India will actually save more than his American counterpart. The work itself can be exciting enough to lure Western-trained Indians back home, too.

According to a study led by Wadhwa and Saxenian, at General Electric’s centre in Bangalore, where they are “designing some of the company’s most advanced technology,” 34 per cent of the research and development staff are recent returnees from the States. And returnees make up half of all PhDs at Bangalore’s IBM Research.

“You see your friends who have gone back home are doing well,” Wadhwa says. “They have the social stature. They have servants and chauffeurs. Why would you be in America when you could be back home doing that?”

But it’s not just about the money. It’s that India, once a dead end for startups, has become fertile ground for the go-getter. Entrepreneurship used to be dominated by the moneyed houses of the upper classes, the only institutions that could afford the up-front capital needed to start companies. So smart guys with great ideas came to Silicon Valley, where they had a much better chance of securing stakes in their own success. But two things are different today: First, most modern high-tech businesses are no longer capital-intensive.

Second, the cash is starting to flow into home-grown Indian startups from within the country. “If you really want to put a marker on how Bangalore is today,” Rammohan says, “maybe it’s not ’75, when Microsoft started. Maybe it’s ’79.” He leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. “They’re going to get there much faster. Maybe 15, rather than 30, years.” He sounds more than a little proud.

At the crossroads
It’s a few weeks later, and I’m back at Gaurav’s Mountain View apartment. He’s moving back to India, giving up his job search, which was halfhearted to begin with, and his apartment is almost bare. I sit on the floor in front of a lone glass table. The detritus of a young man’s life litters its speckled surface: Bollywood movie cases, an ashtray, a few magazines.

Maybe he was just unlucky. Or maybe he took a good look at the situation and realised that going back makes more sense. “I was at this fork in my life,” he says. “A lot of considerations came into play — family, finances. It’s a great time to be back in India, because now India is a market, not just an outsourcing shop. It can be its own thing.

There’s growth, there’s talent, there are a lot of people heading back, there are new ideas.” There’s a good job at a defence-contracting firm waiting for Gaurav in Mumbai. There’s a bed waiting in his parents’ house, too, where he’ll stay while he sets up his new life. Gaurav will let himself be swept out with the tide, but not before he gets a final taste of the Bay Area nightlife. A few days later, we’re at his going-away party. “This,” Gaurav says, “is the first place I got drunk in America.”

We’re at Molly MaGees, in Mountain View, where a cosmopolitan scene plays out as I sip my Guinness in the corner. A jovial, inebriated crowd of young Asian immigrants, mostly tech workers, is packed into an Irish pub. They’re seeing off one of their own, and the atmosphere is part wake, part wedding. I know what many of them are thinking: Will that be me someday? Someday soon?

AMERICA’S ATTRACTION
“I’ve joked with my manager that he has to marry me if he lays me off,” says Vidya Venkat, a 27-year-old from Delhi. She loves living in California but will have to wait years for a green card, assuming she keeps her job at Yahoo!. “You’ll get paid a good amount if you go back to India,” Vidya says, “but you can’t stop the traffic jam from happening. You can’t stop the bureaucracy. These are things you have to deal with on a daily basis: water cuts, electricity

(Benjamin Schrier is a freelance writer and Bay Area native)

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