Name: Why Indian and Chinese Talent Are Rethinking the American Dream
Uploaded: 2025-11-08T18:12:02.000Z
Duration: 11 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The third conditional

What if Elon Musk had been told, pay $100,000 or you can't work in the US or Jensen Huang, CEO of the world's most valuable company, Nvidia.

I don't think that my family would have been able to afford the $100,000.

Modal verbs - B1

The opportunity for my family and for me to be here would not have been possible.

These tech leaders once held H1B visas and went on to build companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

In September 2025, US President Donald Trump announced a controversial move that could fundamentally change that path.

The US has introduced a one time fee of $100,000 for new H1B petitions for workers outside of the US a dramatic jump from the previous 2000 to 5000 per person.

Though the fee doesn't apply to renewals or those already holding a visa, the country would rather not have to pay $100,000.

So where were the majority of H1B visa holders immigrating from in 2024?

More than 70% of H1B recipients were from India.

Chinese nationals accounted for another 12%, while the Philippines, Canada and South Korea each contributed around 1%.

It was also hitting a major nerve about whether the American dream was still worth pursuing.

Is America now overrated as a destination for global talent?

If I have to take the same decision today, I'll probably not take it.

Indian and Chinese engineers have long powered the US Tech industry.

With Amazon, Tata, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, the top employers of H1B visa recipients.

We could see this policy actually impact the global flow of high skilled tech talent.

If that avenue is shut down by a significant degree, perhaps a lot of that talent is going to be staying and working in companies in India, in China, actually founding new tech companies there.

That could really impact global tech competitiveness on quite a large scale.

Graduates from India's elite schools, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, moved to Silicon Valley after earning their degrees.

But could the new visa fee encourage them to stay in India?

Reverse brain drain through an entirely voluntary way of choosing India over the United States?

Right now is still not, in many cases, an economically viable option or a professionally viable option.

Certain conditions in the United States remain still very valuable.

Global standards of walking, better education, and other Social Security benefits that come for the next generations.

A fraction of people will become returnees or return migrants.

And maybe these are the people who have achieved a lot in the west and they have, like, relatively stable careers.

And now they're looking for the Next big opportunity, which might be back in China or India or Korea.

But if I'm a mid career person, I think the proclivity would be to find a similar location such as the uk, Europe, Canada or New Zealand Australia.

According to one piece of research, more than 73% of India affiliated researchers who moved abroad are never returned.

Yet those who do often go on to build new ecosystems.

For India, this is both a test and an opportunity.

The country's projected 283 billion tech sector already powers much of the world's digital backbone.

Indian exports to the United States are rising.

The focus will become much more on digitally delivered services, essentially mean that you get to service clients in the United States through using more digital forms.

And those can essentially come through more active working of the Global Capability centers.

India has become a hub for Global Capability Centres, the offshore arms of multinationals handling it, finance, HR and analytics.

Today the country is home to more than 1,950 GCCs employing over 1.9 million professionals.

Now this is a happy situation on both sides because India is getting much more foreign exchange.

The United States firms are also happy because they are being able to develop a lot of patents patented knowledge through the gccs.

And these are patented knowledges which they are able to use in other countries and obtain significant amounts of licensing fee and proprietary fee as a result.

So it definitely seems that it's going to be tech startups that are most impacted by this policy.

I've spoken to some founders in Silicon Valley, they've told me that outright they won't be able to afford these fees.

Unlike maybe some of the bigger tech companies, they see unrecognized foreign talent as a way that they can kind of get an edge over competition.

But policies don't just affect companies, they influence how workers think about their futures, whether to build a life in the US or to look elsewhere.

To understand how these debates resonate personally, we spoke to Deepak Kothari, a staff system test engineer working in California.

If I think about how India's companies or tech environments are getting built, it's mostly a second version of what has been already built.

In developed nations, there is a huge amount of competition, there are a lot of people and the places of growth are segmented into a particular area or particular niche.

So there is immense opportunities on new companies coming in or like legacy companies, can definitely try to cater towards this market and capture that segment of people who have been not tapped yet.

Chinese tech workers are in a slightly different position.

While China is the second largest source of approved H1B petitions.

India is still building a mature homegrown tech ecosystem.

In 2024, China spent 2.68% of its GDP on R&D, about 506 billion.

That's nearly the size of Thailand's entire economy and four times India's 0.65%, or 27 billion.

By 2025, China also had 343 unicorns, compared to just 64 in India.

China has become more successful in the past decade when it comes to attracting top talents, especially in the field of robotics, AI, new energy supply chain, the battery technology, because these are the precise areas that Chinese government has been prioritizing.

So there are enough funding, there's a policy commitment and there's a good ecosystem in place.

Already there are some top talents from Stanford University, from Google or from Apple have come back to China, joined Baidu or other IT companies.

Over the past decade, China has launched more than 200 talent recruitment programs.

Designed specifically to attract global STEM talents without requiring employer sponsorship, is part of a broader strategy to compete for talent and build domestic innovation capacity.

The K visa is such a big surprise to everyone in China.

We do have 12 million fresh graduates every year coming into the market and many of them do have top engineering degrees.

So it looks like China doesn't really need to import more talents.

But the way that Chinese government reframe this is to attract top talents, the ones that China cannot produce.

They want to make this more of a targeted recruitment rather than a mass immigration plan.

But critics warned the K visa could backfire, bringing in foreign talent at a time when millions of Chinese graduates are already struggling to find jobs.

It does have 30 million labor shortage in manufacturing sector.

But on the other hand, there is a huge job market pressure for people in the areas of finance, it, real estate and education.

So when we think about this mismatch in the job market, it actually reflected the shortcomings of China's education system.

While policies and programs can attract high skilled talent, they don't guarantee return.

Tian Tang, a former H1B holder now based in Lisbon, shares why she chose not to go back to China after leaving the US in 2023.

In my global scan for a new home base, I consider my home country China very seriously.

In fact, I did work for Alibaba in China between 2016 and 2017.

However, there are some aspects that prevented me from ultimately deciding on moving back to China.

First of all, is the infamous 996 culture.

You work 9am to 9pm Six days a week, particularly in fast growing companies and sectors.

I was really looking for a good balance between work, flexibility for family.

That was why I chose Portugal over China.

In IT industry in particular, once someone is above 35 years old, that is considered too old to work in the field.

So they would normally get a chance to quit with some of equities or compensations, or they would just let go.

The government knows how serious this problem is, but simultaneously they know that if China wants to compete with us in the long term, they do need the kind of talents that can develop transformative technology for the future.

The outcome may not be a flood of workers returning, but a shift in how companies and countries manage talent.

And the race isn't just between countries.

The pandemic changed the rules of the game.

Migration is no longer the only path to mobility.

Hybrid and remote models mean talent can increasingly serve global clients from anywhere.

I think the worker is in a great position right now.

Given the fact that you can live in a location of your choice and yet have global opportunities, I think that's a clear victory for the worker.

My prediction is this shock force more startups to embrace the work from anywhere model.

The loss will be of the American economy because now you will have American startups hiring talent across the the world.

So these are a class of organizations that would hire the talent for these companies and then contract out the talent to the startup.

The talent will be working for the American company, but living outside in a foreign country and paying taxes there.

You are not constrained to the labor market of that one city or that one region.