According to a recent survey declining wages and opportunities abroad are prompting NRI IT professionals to move back home. IT and IT enabled companies in India hired 28 percent more NRI professionals in the first quarter of 2011-12, higher than any other industries in the country.
Others who hired NRI returnees are pharma and healthcare, automobiles and manufacturing, banking and financial services and FMCGs.
India's economic growth and opportunities fuelled the NRI's return. That and the fact that many US companies are opening offices in India and hiring more to target Asia's growing market.
Of the cities where high numbers of NRIs found jobs are Bangalore at the top, followed by Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad.
SnapDeal founded by former US NRI Kunal Bahl 28, is fast becoming a high-tech powerhouse in India. Bahl was forced to leave the US where he wanted to stay and build a company, because his H-1B visa expired in 2007. So he left for India and started SnapDeal.
Four hundred employees later, he's ready to take on Groupon!
SnapDeal with $20 million in annual revenue is expected to top $100 million next year and is hiring some 70 people each month.
For the first time, immigrants have better opportunities outside the US. In fact Silicon Valley may be the cradle for tech start-ups but some foreign born executives, engineers and scientists are leaving because of better opportunities back home, strict immigration laws, and California's high cost of living.
No hard data is available but authorities agree the number of foreign born workers returning to India and China annually is in the tens of thousands. Consequently India is now flush with Internet service companies vying to become the country's version of Amazon.com, Groupon or Expedia. The reverse brain drain is ironic as while talented engineers go back home to India, China and elsewhere either by choice or by law, US tech companies are frantically looking to hire engineering and tech related talent.
With tech workers in high demand yet visas in short supply, President Obama is committed to an overhaul of the US's immigration laws. Now fewer foreign students want to go to Silicon Valley to earn engineering and science degrees, a move that will also deplete the educational revenue foreign workers bring into the US.
Many inciteful employers note the irony of competing with the very people they wanted to hire or retain.
