Author: Anthony Spaeth
Publication: www.time.com
Date: June 19, 2000
Indian immigrants to
the U.S. are one of the newest elements of the American melting pot--and
the most spectacular success story
When Manoj Night Shyamalan
was growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1980s, his parents--both
immigrants from India, both physicians--piled on the pressure. "There
was simply an assumption that I'd come first in my class," he recalls.
He was also expected to follow his parents into medicine. When he
told them he would instead study moviemaking at New York University,
they were horrified. Now they feel a lot better. In 1997, five years
after his graduation, Walt Disney Studios paid Shyamalan $2.5 million
for the screenplay of the Bruce Willis thriller The Sixth Sense
and let the young writer direct the movie as well. The ghost tale
has earned more than $680 million worldwide since its release last year
and garnered six Academy Award nominations. "If it hadn't grossed
$100 million," he laughs, "I don't know what my parents would
have done."
Shyamalan, 29, did not
win an Oscar on March 26, but he has carved out another leading role
for himself, as one of America's premier success symbols for 722,000
Indian immigrants and guest workers scattered across the country.
And he is only one among many. Today South Asian immigrants are climbing
the top rungs in just about every industry.
Indians are running FORTUNE
500 companies (Rono Dutta is president of United Airlines, and Rakesh
Gangwal is president and CEO of U.S. Airways) or, as consultants
and securities analysts, telling others how to do so. (Calcutta-born
Rajat Gupta, managing director of consulting giant McKinsey &
Co., does both.) But above all, they are bringing their own entrepreneurial
stamp to America's high-tech frontiers. Venture- capital fund Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's biggest VC firms, says
40% of its portfolio consists of companies founded or managed by
people of Indian origin. Indians have one of the highest per capita
incomes of any immigrant group in the U.S. "It is a credit to this
country that someone from a distant land can become an American,"
says Suhas Patil, founder and chairman emeritus of semiconductor
manufacturer Cirrus Logic (1999 revenues: $564 million), who is now
running an incubator company called Tufan, Inc. for Internet
start-ups. "I am what defines America."
The Indian success story
is a triumph of quality over quantity.
According to the Center
for Immigration Studies in Washington, an independent think tank,
the U.S. is home to about 26.3 million immigrants, defined as
people living in the U.S. who are foreign born and have permission
to stay permanently. India's 722,000 is less than the number from
the Dominican Republic.
Some 15,000 to 20,000
Indians get student visas to the U.S. each year, and many manage
to land jobs after graduation and stay on. But Japan gets three times
that number, and South Korea double. The only category in which India
really leads immigration statistics is the number of people granted
H1B visas for "workers with speciality occupations." Indians take
about 20% of all H1B visas issued each year, by far the largest
proportion.
Other numbers tell an
even more intriguing success story. Only 6% of Indian immigrants
live below the poverty line, vs. 31% of Mexicans and 8% of immigrants
from Britain. Fewer than 1% use public assistance. While there
has long been a trickle of immigration from South Asia, the big change
came in 1965 when U.S. immigration statutes were liberalized to attract
scientists and engineers to work in an American economy revved up
by the Vietnam War. They fanned out to aircraft companies, NASA,
military contractors and universities. Doctors were needed for President
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society medical programs, and they were
given preference too. Fewer than 2,000 people immigrated to the U.S.
from India in the decade of the 1950s; in the '60s, 27,189 arrived;
by the '80s, the number had jumped to a quarter-million. The immigrants
often took jobs Americans had turned down because the pay was low
or the location remote. "There would be an opening for a surgeon
in Champagne, Ill.," says Fareed Zakaria, a Bombay-born academic
who is managing editor of the prestigious quarterly Foreign Affairs,
"and an Indian would take it."
Then came the Silicon
Valley boom, which shows no sign of letting up. As a result of all
these circumstances, the Indian diaspora in the U.S. tends to be
the intellectual and commercial elite.
According to the Center
for Immigration Studies, only 3% of Indian arrivals lack a high school
education, and 75% of working Indians are college graduates. (For
immigrants from China, the figure is 55%.) Says Rajini Srikanth,
a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Massachusetts:
"What we got were people who already came blessed with all kinds
of valuable baggage." In many cases, the Indian schools that
newcomers had attended were as good as or better than many of their
U.S. counterparts.
Strong family ties also
have helped. Vijay Goradia, who emigrated from Bombay in 1977 and
now has a private petrochemical business in Houston with more
than $600 million in revenues last year, says he could afford to
take the entrepreneurial plunge because two brothers had preceded
him to the U.S. and served as his safety net. "It gives you the spirit
to be free, to take chances," he says.
Yet at the same time,
people from the subcontinent have tended to aim more than other first-generation
arrivals for mainstream jobs, either in the professions or
in corporations. Some of that is a hangover from British colonial
experience, where a job in the civil service was the ultimate badge
of accomplishment and security--a sentiment still strong on
the subcontinent. More positively, Indian immigrants say they fit
into corporate America because they already speak English.
According to AnnaLee
Saxenian, an associate professor of city and regional planning at
the University of California, Berkeley, about one-third of the engineers
in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while 7% of valley high-tech
firms are led by Indian ceos. Some successes are well known, such
as Vinod Khosla, co- founder of Sun Microsystems, and Sabeer Bhatia, who
founded HotMail and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million. The number
of Indian American New Economy millionaires is in the thousands.
Massachusetts' Gururaj Deshpande, co-founder of a number of
network-technology companies, is worth between $4 billion and $6
billion.
Bigger changes loom with
the second generation: the kids are sure to have ingrained Indian
values but a world view completely at odds with their parents'.
Dilip Massand, co-founder of http://Masala.com, an Internet site
for the second generation that he hopes to build into a "virtual
diaspora," was raised from the age of six months in the New York
City borough of Queens.
Massand remembers going
to makeshift Hindu shrines in people's basements. "The Catholics
had beautiful churches, and the Jews had elaborate synagogues," he
recalls. "I remember asking myself why our gods lived in a basement."
It remains to be seen
whether those successful Indian Americans can go back to kick-start
opportunities in their native land, in the way that a "reverse brain
drain" of technical talent helped build Taiwan's computer industry
in the 1980s and '90s. K.S. Ramakrishna, raised in the southern state
of Karnataka, got an M.B.A. from Ohio's Case Western Reserve
University in 1990 but was forced to return home when his family
business near Bangalore ran into difficulties. He straightened out
the firm--it makes electric cables--but was disgusted by the local
business culture: the complacency, corruption and lack of vision.
But Ramakrishna persevered.
He started his own business, growing roses for export, and
senses that further opportunities abound. "For me to start up a
business in America, I'd have to come up with some brilliant idea,"
he says. "Here it's so simple: you find an idea abroad, modify it
for Indian conditions, and you make money." The crowning achievement
of the Indian diaspora may be that its members bring that same
entrepreneurial spark back to life in their homeland.
