“Why do these people flock to the US, simply because the US has more opportunities.”

Why would anybody with professsional skills anymore flock to the USA– instead of, say, to the European Continent? I’m of Indian background myself (my parents moved to New Jersey from Maharashtra when I was 3), but I’m telling you, if you have professional potential and special esp. technical skills, the US is *not* the place to go to anymore. Trust me, you really don’t have many entrepreneurial opportunities anymore because the work environment in this country is toxic, anywhere you go. Especially if you’re someone like an engineer, a computer scientist or a doctor, you’ll be working 80+ hours a week for a diminishing salary, higher costs of living and a plummeting dollar, and you’ll be so exhausted all the time that you won’t be able to launch a business.

Educational costs in the United States are so ridiculous that you’ll wind up a permanent debtor, and God forbid you have the misfortune of an illness or a car accident– you’ll wind up bankrupt. I personally know 5 good friends from my university days, all with advanced degrees in some cases from Ivy League Universities, who are now declaring bankruptcy due to a combination of personal injury (e.g. from car accidents, which tend to happen when you’re working nonstop 80-hour weeks and are so exhausted) and debtload from college/grad school. Plus, with the dollar tanking as it is against the Euro, you suffer the additional insult of further erosion of your earnings due to currency depreciation. And this will only get worse due to the increasing US national debt and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most of the smartest professional Americans I know are getting language tapes or courses in e.g. French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch or Spanish and emigrating from the United States. (*DON’T* go to Britain or Australia– their work environments are almost as bad as the USA these days and the educational costs there are also soaring.) They work much more reasonable hours– maybe 50-55 hours a week, tops– they have entire weeks off, they have more energy and better health, and they have a much easier time starting new businesses. Continental Europe has gotten very business-friendly for professionals with advanced degrees from e.g. the US or Canada, or from India, South Korea or China, for that matter. Especially if you come in wanting to start a business, they’ll basically offer you a visa right off the bat. Even more so if you’re in the computer, engineering, medical or pharmaceutical fields.

Plus, you earn your income and eventually your profits in Euros, a much, much better currency than the dollar, which you can also use for international travel and expand your business horizons even further. If you’re a professional and/or entrepreneur esp. with technical skills, you have a much, much better earning potential, entrepreneurial capacity and quality of life in Continental Europe than you do in the United States, Britain or Australia.

For that matter, even some places in South America are better entrepreneurial places than the US these days due to a much less toxic work environment and all kinds of sponsorship opportunities for foreign-born entrepreneurs. If you can speak Portuguese– and this surprised me when I first heard it– then Brazil has some fantastic opportunities in the IT, engineering, publishing, medical, legal and accounting fields. There’s a burgeoning Indian entrepreneurial community in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, that is flourishing with much better quality of life than in the USA. (One of my best Indian friends from college moved there and is living like nobility.) If you have technical/engineering skills, then the government in Brasilia will basically roll out a red carpet for you. If you can speak Spanish, then Chile, Uruguay and also Costa Rica also have similarly wonderful opportunities with better quality of life and much more affordable cost of living than in the United States.

It’s shocked me how much things have changed, but even my own family members have told me that if they were leaving India today, they wouldn’t come to the United States, or to Britain or Australia. Continental Europe and even some places in South America have much better opportunities for skilled professionals and entrepreneurs starting up companies.

Some where down the line we all agree that INDIANNESS is above everything else.If all of us recognise and acknowledge our talent,skill and knowledge, we can do the the impossible.
No doubt our country has made remarkable strides in all spheres of science and technology but we are still lacking in progress and development of our society at large.

If we review our current five year plan of 2007-2011 Government of india has projected that even after all round development in scial and industrial segments there will be 22% of population which will be below poverty line.22% is 22 crores if we take population of 1 billion.Our neighbour china showed much better progress not only in industrial sector but also in social sector as well.

Well defined strategy along with tactics and planning with proper guidance and path will take us among the league of most developed nations of the world.

Dear Ravi,
Thank you for hijacking the theme of the article, I would have preferred if you would have mentioned about NRIs returning to India. The idea is to promote entrepreneurship, I am sure in the current recession times, a lot of people would be coming back to India to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.