They're coming to America ... and staying
By Raja M
MUMBAI - When
Harpreet Singh left Mumbai in 1994 to study chemical
engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
he realized the dream of millions of Indians. From
childhood, Harpreet wanted to go to America, so he built
a little book of addresses, earned a scholarship, and is
now one of more than 2 million Indians living in the
United States.
In the 10
years since he arrived in the US, Harpreet abandoned
chemicals and became a successful software engineer
in Lexington, Tennessee. He married a college mate, Sudha
Chidambaram, a relative of Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan
Chidambaram, has a two-year-old daughter, Kanika, and as yet has
no plans to return to India.
Harpreet's
younger brother Navjot, who has joined him, is a
software engineer in Washington, DC. Their father, Chanchal
Singh Chopra, and mother, Harvinder, manage the family
real-estate properties back in Mumbai.
But a
generation of such Indians share a transcontinental
family life under clouds of market forces, such as the
bitter outsourcing debate. Elderly parents live in
India, rather than struggle to adjust to American
culture. Meanwhile, the children do not wish to
resettle in India. They are divided by distance and a
diverging destiny, but technology helps bridge the
emotional gap.
"The Internet and cheaper
telephone rates have made a huge difference," said
Chanchal-ji ("ji" is an honorific word used in India for
elders). He chats with his sons daily for a few minutes.
His wife Harvinder wistfully sees her granddaughter
through the thousands of photographs placed on compact
discs that are couriered home. Relieved at current phone
rates of Rs7 (15 US cents) a minute, the couple recalled
wryly: "Staying in touch in the mid-1990s cost us Rs90 a
minute of calls and Rs8 a line of text for e-mail
through the IIT [Indian Institute of Technology]
computers."
Feeding the
motherland Remittances from non-resident Indians
(NRIs) such as Harpreet feed the Indian economy. Global
NRI remittances rose to US$3.62 billion in 2003-04, from
$2.97 billion in 2002-03. The flow of private transfers
jumped to $18.8 billion in 2003-04 from $14.8 billion in
2002-03, Minister of State for NRI Affairs Jagdish
Tytler told India's upper parliamentary house, the Rajya
Sabha, in July.
But US dollars earned
through outsourcing make for a bigger flood and louder
noise. According to a widely quoted study by India's
NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service
Companies) and consultant McKinsey, the outsourcing
business in India will be worth about $24 billion by
2008. Outsourced work would include customer interaction
services, business process outsourcing (BPO), content
development, transcription/translation, content
development and biotech research. The BPO segment alone
is currently worth $3.6 billion.
This May, Forrester Research confirmed its earlier
prediction in 2002 that over the next 15 years, 3.3 million
US service-industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will
flee offshore to countries such as India, Russia, China and the
Philippines. This is why, despite hopes of these figures
evoking cheers for India-US ties, a perceived
clash of interests will have these two great democracies
grinding against each other like two tectonic plates,
and sharing more of a rivalry than a healthy
relationship.
Pro-India,
anti-outsourcing Inevitably, and for the
first time, India looms as a debating point in the
US presidential election. Democratic Party
presidential contender John Kerry opposes outsourcing US work.
"If [I] am elected president, I will fight for the most
sweeping international tax law reform in 40 years,"
Kerry promised on his official campaign website. He
plans to "replace tax incentives to take jobs offshore
with new incentives for job creation on our own shores".
US politicians are trying to
manage an anti-outsourcing policy without being
anti-Indian. On May 12, two months after Kerry outlined
his economic agenda, the US House of Representatives passed 415-2
a resolution praising Indian-Americans. Similar
resolutions earlier failed to get sufficient votes.
House Congressional Resolution No 352 was sponsored and
backed by two Democrats, Juanita Millender-McDonald and
Tom Lantos, a ranking member of the International
Relations Committee. Both were backed by the
Indian-American community during their election
campaigns.
In a 448-word statement, Millender-McDonald
said it was hard to think of an ethnic
group that made such an enormous contribution to the
United States as Indians: "People of Indian origin have
made extraordinary contributions to the United States,
helping to make the United States a more efficient
and prosperous country." The resolution praised
the "generations of doctors and nurses, [and]
scientists who have helped in defense, space, medical
and computational research", and remembered Kalpana
Chawla, the Indian-American astronaut who died in the
Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003.
Asians,
together
with Pacific islanders, form 4.5% of the United
States' 281.4 million people, according to census figures
from 2000. Asians will be the fastest-rising population
group in the US over the next half-century,
expected to increase to 14 million by 2010, and to
triple its present size to 33 million in 2050.
The Indian-American population grew by 106% from
1990. In an ironic turn of history, the people whom
Christopher Columbus originally expected to find when he
landed on American shores in 1492, thinking he had
reached India, his originally intended destination, are
landing there in greater numbers than ever before.
And many more are on the way. The
US Consulate General in Mumbai, the busiest US
consular operation in South Asia, issued 10,319
non-immigrant visas and 6,630 immigrant visas last month, almost a
tenfold leap from August 2003 figures of 1,110 and 725
respectively.
"Almost every upper-middle-class
apartment building in Mumbai has three or more families
with relatives in the USA," said Ramakrishnan Krishnan,
who works for a media house and has a brother, two
cousins and a next-door neighbor with two daughters all
living in the United States.
Aryan
Khanna (name changed on request), a senior software
professional from Mumbai, has been in the United States for the
past nine months, in Denver, Colorado. With his
wife and four-year-old son, he lives in a two-bedroom house
in an apartment complex with a swimming pool,
tennis courts and gymnasium. He drives a Nissan Altima,
preferring an Asian car like most other Indians in Denver. He
works a flexible eight-hour shift each day, with the
option of working from home, and his American bosses
(whom he rates higher than his Indian ones) give
him weekends off. Software professionals like Khanna earn
an average annual income of $50,000-$60,000, and have material
comforts a similar job in India can't offer.
But not all Asians in the US live
prosperously. A University of Massachusetts study,
"Asian Americans in Metro Boston: Growth, Diversity and
Complexity", found many Asian-Americans at both ends of
the socio-economic scale. Indians had a median household
income of $72,000, about $20,000 higher than the median
income for the population as a whole. But the study found nearly
one-fourth of Cambodian and Pakistani families living in
poverty. It also said that many Asian-Americans, no
matter what their economic or education levels, still
grapple with discrimination and a lack of political
empowerment.
They also grapple with the
undercurrent of fear and insecurity that is prevalent
amongst most visible minorities in the United States.
Under the unprecedented heat of a political debate, and
having become the latest targets for right-wing
extremists, Indians, particularly software
professionals, appear to be hunkering down.
IndoLink, a California-based ethnic
portal, published what it called a clandestine
document sponsored by two extreme right-wing conservative
groups, the American Heritage Foundation and the
American Immigration Foundation. It is a document that
IndoLink said was circulating among top US policymakers and
conservative think-tanks. "Immigrants from Asia are
poised to strike at the very heart of the nation, and
the problem can only get worse as America moves further
into the 21st century," the document warns. It says
America's security, prosperity, domestic political
unity, health and welfare face an unprecedented threat
from legal and illegal Asian immigrants. The journalist
who wrote that story, Francis C Assisi, told Asia Times
Online that his information came from sources at the
American Immigration Control Foundation.
A former Federal Bureau of Investigation director
is quoted in the report as stating that immigrants
from South Asia are the most likely to import their
terrorist activities into the US, claiming there are
fronts representing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, Khalistan and Kashmiri militant groups. Warning of
an "immigration time bomb", the document says Indian
and other Asian immigrants displace US citizens from
well-paying jobs.
Khanna said he had not
yet directly felt the outsourcing backlash because he is
still employed for an Indian firm. "But it is becoming
difficult to get projects here," he said. "Until
September or so there are lots of jobs on offer as there
are few H1 visas [for working professionals]. People
with H1s are in demand."
After a typical Indian
supper of chapathi (thin pancake-like wheat
bread), rice and dal (lentil curry), Khanna said
in an online chat that he and his wife chose their
neighborhood in Denver because their Indian friends
lived there. About 10 minutes away are four Indian
restaurants and four Indian grocery shops owned by
friendly Gujaratis and Punjabis who rent out Indian
movies as well. His wife said she feels as safe on
Denver roads as she did back home in Mumbai. Amid
household chores, she chats online with her family when
it's night in Mumbai. At night in Denver, her husband
chats with his brother when its morning in Mumbai. It's
another family in a global village transcending
continents and time.
In Mumbai, Chanchal-ji and
his wife are preparing to fly to Washington on September
6, to spend two months with their children. They say
they are much more fortunate than a septuagenarian
professor friend whose son visits India from the US on
business trips, takes a taxi and spends two hours a year
with his parents. "There are hundreds of people in this
neighborhood itself whose children are in the USA,"
Chanchal-ji said. "We should form an association for
parents of NRIs." If current trends continue, its
membership could run into the millions.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India.
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