Let me tell you something I noticed while the people in charge were busy telling us everything is fine.
The smart folks are leaving.
Not coming here. Leaving. Channel News Asia just reported that Indian professionals, the same people who spent decades building our tech companies and our banks and our hospitals, are moving back to India. Not because they got homesick. Because the math stopped working.
Varun Sachdeva runs recruiting for NLB Services, and he said it plain: there is “a lot of unpredictability, of volatile situations across the globe with changing visa norms.” His firm literally launched a whole division just to help people find jobs back in India. Read that twice. A recruitment company built an entire practice around helping professionals leave the United States. When the people who get paid to track talent movements start reorganizing their business around exit strategies, maybe, just maybe, the bureaucrats in Washington should stop patting themselves on the back.
Here is what I keep thinking about. About one-third of the roughly 600 high-tech startups founded in India between 2016 and 2023 were started by people who came back from abroad. That is per the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi. So we trained them. We gave them the experience. And then we made it so expensive and so complicated to stay that they took all of that and went home to build competitor companies. Does that sound like a winning strategy to anyone with a functioning brain?
Sangram Raje spent six years in New York as a quantitative analyst. He went back to India in 2014 and co-founded an AI company. He told CNA, “The fascination of going to the US has definitely decreased over the years.” I want that quote tattooed on the forehead of every policymaker who thinks squeezing visa holders is a flex. The man had a quant job in Manhattan, one of the most coveted positions on the planet, and he looked around and said, actually, no thanks.
Shambhavi Gupta went to UC, landed a role at a top investment bank in San Francisco, and still went back to Mumbai to start her own company. She said India is “having its own moment on the global stage.” She is 26 years old and she already figured out what it took me four kids and a mortgage to learn: the people running things here do not have your best interests at heart. They have their own.
And it is not just first-generation immigrants anymore. Salman Khurshid, a former minister in India, pointed out that second-generation Indians are coming back too. Kids who grew up in the West are looking at the cost of housing, the visa chaos, the political circus, and saying, you know what, maybe Grandma was right about moving home.
I have four kids. I think about what their futures look like every single day. And I watch the people in charge make it harder and more expensive to build a life here while other countries are rolling out the red carpet for exactly the kind of talent we are driving away. India is now the fastest-growing major economy on Earth. We are the ones with the rising costs and the shrinking opportunities and the politicians who think the answer to every problem is another form to fill out.
The brain drain reversed, and nobody in power even blinked. That tells you everything you need to know about who is actually paying attention in this country, and who is just collecting a paycheck while the best people pack their bags.