“I am so happy I returned home in time,” said my doctor friend after the recent H-1B visa uncertainties hit the Indian diaspora in the US. “I can’t imagine living in a country where the ruling dispensation is anti-immigrant,” he added.

It took me back to my days of working overseas and the anxieties of foreign nationals working around me. When I was in an Asia Pacific role, 10 per cent of my colleagues were from Southeast Asian countries. They were the hardest-working, most productive, and most compliant coworkers. These employees knew that their work permits depended on the employer, and they didn’t have any protection from local labour departments if they were fired without any reason overnight. My sense was that this fear of losing their job played a part in their subservient behaviour.

This begs the question: are the jobs overseas as rosy as we paint them to be? Every year, lakhs of white-collar Indians migrate to foreign countries. We celebrate the 35 million-odd Indians who live abroad and the $135 billion they remit back to India every year. But what about their anxieties? 

The overseas stamp

Let’s face it, there is no better branding than working overseas. For many of us, studying or working abroad has been aspirational. If anyone known to us says they are working in, say, Canada or the US, we stop asking which company or the role they play there; such is the allure of some of these countries. The generous ones who return for a month-long annual holiday with scotch and premium chocolates make us feel envious of them. How many of us in India take a month-long holiday even if we have arrived in our careers in a coveted role, or maybe are entrepreneurs who have had a celebrated exit?

Life @ Uncle Sam

“In Europe, we don’t come to work fearing for our jobs whereas in America I have observed employees constantly afraid of losing their jobs,” said my new European boss once when she moved from Europe to the US. Though it sounded like a sweeping statement from her, studies have consistently shown the additional stress in the American workforce compared to the European workforce. 

A 2024 survey by Kickresume showed that 52 per cent of Americans were either always or often stressed or unhappy at work, compared to 36 per cent of Europeans who felt the same. In a so-called free country, why doesn’t the same spirit spill over to the office spaces? But the US still has the largest Indian diaspora. How many of our friends and relatives share with us the workspace anxieties in the US? We only see their holiday pictures on Insta, snow in their backyard, their weekend drives in nice cars, and make assumptions about how rosy it is to live there.

The good life

There is no denying that when we visit these developed countries and inhale their clean air, witness the swank infrastructure and their picturesque tourist places, we get mesmerised. The frictions of traffic, institutional corruption, the dust and infrastructural struggles in India make us feel deprived of a quality of life that one thinks can only be experienced overseas. What are we missing here? How about social life? Have you observed that most or almost all of the people NRIs socialise with are People of Indian origin?

How can you live or call a country yours when you are not part of the native social circles? Is it us or is it them that’s causing this cocoon in which Indians create mini Indias there? The maids, the drivers, everything at the press of the button at your door is in India, so are the rising salaries, which are more attractive than the stagnant dollar pay, which only gives a high when you multiply by 88. Despite all these, over the last three years, about 420,000 Indians have relocated to the US, which includes short-term stints and migrations.

GharWapsi

Approximately, one-third of IIT graduates leave India each year for higher education or work. The percentage is significantly higher for the elite, where almost 60 per cent of the top 100 students are migrating abroad. Could the new one-time H-1B fees of $100,000 change this brain drain?

Over the last 12 months, about 359,000 white collared talent came back to India from over 100+ countries, of which 88,000 returned from the US. It took 45 days for my nephew with 10 years’ work experience in New York to land a well-paid job in a Bengaluru product GCC. Every second job he applied for he got a call for an interview. It’s not just him. Over the last three years, the top five bellwether product tech brands like Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Amazon have added 63,000 new employees to their Indian entities.

The mixed bag

The GCCs have added 320,000 new jobs in the last three years in India. At any given time, there are 30,000 new open jobs in GCCs alone. Of course, there are challenges to overcome to secure these jobs, and they are the familiar ones like skills, pay, and the city that needs to be matched. It’s not all hunky dory yet. The current H1B imbroglio has led to the top five Indian IT firms (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Tech & Tech M) collectively losing approximately $36.2 billion in their market valuation within the four days leading up to September 25, 2025.

With about 7 million tech workforce employed and 230,000 annual fresh pass outs of computer science engineers, should we say “It’s difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

(The author is the Co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing company)

Published on September 29, 2025