[kansando]

This article and all others on the topic seem to confuse two different trends: 1> That there is a real incentive for the very best to return to India and China because they are self-confident and know that they can thrive anywhere, and 2> That the current H1-B regime (read indentured labor) is abused by corporations, especially IT outsourcers to bring in bodies. In my case, after a PhD at a top 5 engineering school and a 7 year wait at a Fortune 500 company, I finally got a Green card. I started a company within a month of that, we have over 100 employees (all in the US) and we are hiring today. The generation of PhD's before me used to get their Green Cards in three months. I see a lot of my friends now contemplating a return to India and China. I think this is bad for the US and bad for Silicon Valley. It basically comes down to this, in intellectual fields, the most productive workers are 10X better than the median. Multiple that with a 10X tolerance for risk (which a lot of immigrants with much lower fixed costs and lower expectations from life tend to have) and you are talking about losing someone who is 100X more valuable (in economic terms) than the average worker. If we don't figure out who these people are and insist on having them wait in the H1B line along with everyone else, we are doing ourselves a great disservice. BTW my cofounder is American, also falls in the 100X category - so this is not a statement about "all Chinese/Indians are superior to all Americans". His daughters are learning Chinese as a backup plan. By mixing legal with illegal immigration (due to the relative strength of some of the lobbies) and uber-skilled with somewhat skilled immigration, we are creating a mess.