One of the most popular notions in India is that it is Indian talent that has been driving the engine of American technological progress. In other words, America is what it is, because of the NRIs or the Indian-Americans. Indians believe that the clever Americans are always on the lookout for the formidable Indian talent, and the bright Indian students are ‘scooped’ by them to the fabled land. So much so that when an Indian student, after stumbling through the admission test GRE (Graduate Record Examination) several times, finally secures admission in a US university without any assistantship, the parents proudly proclaim that the university has ‘offered’ him/her to pursue a course there and oblige it. After that, we are told that America provides him/her the finest creature comforts of life, in return for working in the NASA or some similar place so as to take America to the heights of the glory it is. In this article, we will ruthlessly demolish the myth of Indian talent driving American progress with authentic facts and figures.
When the government became victim of an internet hoax
It is not just the ignorant Indian middle-class which hangs on to this fantasy. In 2008, a central minister had also gone on to claim so in the parliament. In March 2008, the Minister of State for Human Resource Development Purandeshwari told the Rajya Sabha that 38% of doctors, 36% of NASA scientists and 34% of Microsoft employees were Indians. Besides this, 28% of IBM, 17% of Intel and 13% of Xerox employees were also Indians. This was debunked by a leading newspaper almost immediately after the news was published in the same paper. They showed that this hoax had been circulating on the Internet since several years. Come WhatsApp and the ghost of this hoax rose again in 2019 with greater virulence, taking the figure of Indians in NASA to as much as 58%.
Fact is, NASA’s 2020 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Report speaks of 12.3% Asian Americans workforce. Google, Microsoft etc. all of them speak in terms of Asian Americans only. As the US Census Bureau clarifies, this includes all people with origins in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, that is, in some 28 countries, not just India!
Not singling out people by race or religion is standard practice all over the world. If you recall, the Sachar Committee in India had the gall to seek religious composition of the Indian army, and the army had firmly refused.
The recent H-1B Visa issue
H-1B visa allows American employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. The pre-election stance of Trump was to tighten the regime and that had, to some extent, contributed to his victory on the plank of MAGA (Make America Great Again). Now, because of his excessive love for Elon Musk, an open battle over the misuse of the H-1B visa regime has broken out between two groups of Trump supporters; the DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) guys led by biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk versus MAGA (Make America Great Again) guys.
The mere fact that once Elon Musk (though now he has backtracked to a great extent and said that ‘H-1B is broken, needs reform’) supported H1-B visas and Trump’s wavering from his pre-election position, has given a fresh impetus to the myth of Indian talent. Now the Indian propagandists are saying that Trump and Musk support H-1B visas because the Indian migrants are crucial to USA.
Joining their bandwagon is a section of the Indian media. Without going into such deep analysis as this article presents, they are trying to bolster the myth of the Indian immigrants being responsible for USA’s achievements. One paper wrote an editorial with the heading ‘Migrants are US’ (us in the sense of me and you). Another paper wrote an editorial titled ‘MAGALOMANIA: White nativists can’t digest success of Indians in US. Smart measures are called for’.
By God, if the Indian immigrants to the USA are really so great, they should be castigated and socially ostracised for having committed the ‘moral treason’ (if not legal treason) of abandoning their country in its hour of need when they could have contributed significantly to its success story.
Musk and Ramaswamy are not elected representatives of the people and theirs is not vox populi. They are just rich men, trying to get richer. Precisely for this reason, people like Laura Loomer and other MAGA guys are calling out their bluff. They point out with data that rather than bring in top foreign talent, US corporations and off-shoring firms have gamed the system to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower wage IT and financial services professionals, suppressing wages of American professionals and often replacing them. Authentic data have been produced to show that Musk’s Tesla itself has used H-1B visas to hire almost only ‘ordinary’ workers whereas elite tech talent hired from across the world is only 0.01%.
The farce of Indian CEOs and Doctors
Since the past few years, it has become fashionable to recite the names of CEOs of the 16 Fortune 500 companies or politicians of Indian origin as ‘living proofs’ of Indian talent that has been driving America. Thank God, Kamala Harris was defeated soundly. While people of Indian origin have done financially very well, they cannot be claimed to have made any significant contribution to America’s technological might. CEOs are just high-ranked managerial employees, not scientists or inventors.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) 2020 report on ‘Diversity in the Physician Workforce’, Indian-Americans comprised around 6.2% of all physicians and surgeons in the USA. These doctors are mostly practicing doctors and not medical scientists. Show me any significant medical innovation or research by them, which have made a difference in your life. Moreover, what do the numbers prove? Does it prove that US born people of white or black races are incapable of becoming doctors and they have to meet the shortfall by Indians?
If NASA has some astronauts of Indian origin, the question is so what? An astronaut is just a payload in a rocket. The Russians had, once upon a time, sent a female dog Laika also to space. What is there to be proud of in astronauts of Indian origin, or in the wife of a VP being Indian? Who cares?
Indians in US companies are mostly techno-coolies
There is a hell of a difference in inventing something and being a technically qualified person who works on those inventions. Indians might be flying the best fighter jets in the world with great skill; it is still a far cry from Indians having designed and made those fighter jets.
When we say that most of the Indians working in American companies are Techno-coolies, we mean precisely this. They are technically qualified and use those technologies with skill. That makes them skilled labourers and not inventors of those technologies. There is a fundamental difference in being a part of technical workforce and having contributed something original to technology. A Formula One race driver does not become the designer of those cars. In respect of the famed IT sector, the term ‘IT coolies’ is used to describe workers who perform routine technical tasks without contributing anything to the development of new technologies.
Further, a clear distinction must be made in regard to original path-breaking research with what is known as incremental research. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in 2020, Indian inventors accounted for just around 3.4% of total patent applications filed in the US. Most of them turn out to be commercially unviable. Even otherwise, most of these patents are actually incremental improvements on existing systems rather than revolutionary inventions. You don’t have to dig far. Just look around yourself and check how many of the things that you use owe their existence to the patents of these Indian-Americans? And for God’s sake, spare us Hotmail and the Bose speakers!
When the myth-makers speak of the high percentage of Indians in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs, they very cleverly conceal critical things. It does not mean that they are all great scientists or inventors taking America to great heights. By definition, STEM workers include people working in offices of technical concerns, healthcare workers and physician assistants also, which skew the percentage.
India’s contribution in pure sciences: reality check
Since 1968, that is, in 56 years, there have been only three scientists of Indian origin who got the Nobel Prize while working in the USA. Even for those three Nobel Laureates, Har Gobind Khorana (medicine/physiology) had moved out of India in 1945 itself at the age of 23. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (physics) had moved out of India at the age of 20. Venki Ramakrishnan (chemistry) had moved out of India immediately after his graduation. In fact, both his parents had obtained their PhDs from USA/Canada. The point being made is that their entire higher level training and subsequent decades of research had been abroad. It is not that the Americans were awestruck by the talents of these Indian child prodigies, whisked them away and, lo and behold, they became Nobel Laureates. Bullshit.
No Indian-origin mathematician has ever received the Fields Medal. No Indian-origin computer scientist has ever received a Nobel Prize. Only one Indian-origin computer scientist, Raj Reddy, has received the Turing Award (1994). Indian Americans make up just around 1-2% of National Academy of Sciences members and just around 2-3% of National Academy of Engineering members.
Why the flood of Indian immigrants
People of Indian origin make up approximately 1.47% of the US population, numbering over 5.1 million. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) gives a figure of 1.2%. Between 1965 and the mid-1990s, long-term immigration from India averaged about 40,000 people per year. From 1995 onward, it increased significantly, reaching a high of about 90,000 immigrants in the year 2000. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Indian immigrants registered a growth of 69.37%. In 2019, about 62% of Indian-Americans were foreign-born, while about 38% were born in the US.
If anything, the sheer desperation to migrate reflects poorly on India as well as Indians that so many people are prepared to give their right eyes to leave India forever and take up routine jobs in the USA even as we are given to believe that India is doing extremely well. How can you reconcile the two? The truth is that Indians die for the better physical quality of life in the USA, and their being saved from the fierce competition in Indian engineering/medical education and job market.
Reasons behind the hoax
In view of the above, it is thus established that Indian-Americans are NOT disproportionately contributing to the USA’s technological advancements. Their contribution is in line with their population representation in the US.
Then what explains the hoax and its persistence. The psychological reason is simple. Deep down their hearts, most Indians do know that Indian scientists and engineers have really not made any significant contribution to world science. Not one of important technical innovations or inventions affecting our lives has been made by Indian research. Even in a field as critical as defence, we are still heavily dependent on outright imports or, at best, joint ventures. This has given the Indians a huge subconscious inferiority complex. So, they try to console themselves by deluding themselves into believing that, never mind, even if the Indian talent has not been able to give anything to India, they have given a hell of a lot to far-off America! It is not touching their lives in any way, they do not even see it; but they love to bask in the fictitious glory of their sons and daughters! Pathetic, simply pathetic!
