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Posted
on 03-Feb-02 01:39 AM
Slump creates reverse exodus of immigrant tech workers
BY JENNIFER BJORHUS
Mercury News
MUMBAI, India -- The rice maker, blender and bread maker went to charity.
The dining room table, the television and the leather couch they had carefully picked out together, they sold. Niranjan and Sandhya could not afford to get sentimental.
Still, Sandhya had forbidden her husband the engineer from selling the glass-encased clock her co-workers back in India had given her when she went away. It held the spot of honor on the entertainment center in their Fremont apartment, a piece of home marking the days of their new life.
``I promised her a lot. I said jobs are plentiful,'' the 29-year-old Niranjan says.
Four months after getting a pink slip from his San Jose employer, Niranjan's big dream of starting his own software company had come to this: a one-way ticket back to India, the day before Christmas.
With tech's fortunes slumping, laid-off programmers like Niranjan have been streaming back to India. ``The Global Indian's in Reverse Exodus,'' heralds a New Year's Day paper in New Delhi. There's even a Web site to help with the re-entry (www.return2India.com).
No one knows how many of the estimated 250,000 Indians working in the United States on special H-1B visas have headed home since the technology bubble burst and recession set in. H-1B visas allow foreigners to stay in the United States for six years as long as they're employed by a sponsor company. With no job, it's either find a new sponsor or leave.
The U.S. government doesn't track H-1B exits. H.H.L. Viswanathan, India's consul general in San Francisco, guesses that at least 2,000 H-1B visa workers from the Bay Area have headed home in the past year. Raj Desai, president of the Indus Entrepreneur, figures it's more like tens of thousands.
The reverse exodus illustrates the undertow of economic globalization -- people caught in the storm, as globalization-watcher William Greider puts it, of an economic revolution that's rewriting psychological boundaries and norms of business.
The story of Sandhya and Niranjan -- they asked not to be identified further -- is about this storm. It's a tale of opportunity and bottom-line shakeouts, of excitement and pain, of two homes and the upheaval in between.
It's also about a fairly new concept for people like Niranjan: no job security like back home.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/home020302.htm
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