In 2012, when I wrote Immigrant Exodus, the world of technology startups was overwhelmingly American. Outside the United States, unicorns—billion-dollar startups—were rare, and for India and China even having one or two was a dream. I warned that America’s broken immigration system would drive away the very people who built its innovation economy.
Fast-forward to today, and the landscape has flipped. The U.S. still leads with around 700 unicorns, roughly half the global total. China has more than 400, and India has emerged as the third-largest hub with over 100. Meanwhile, the trickle of returnee entrepreneurs that my research noted a decade ago has swelled into a flood. Innovation is no longer confined to Silicon Valley; it is just as likely to be born in Bangalore or Berlin.
Now President Donald Trump has accelerated the exodus I predicted. His decision to impose a $100,000 yearly “tariff” on every H-1B worker is a dagger to the heart of America’s competitiveness—and a golden gift to India.
Indentured servitude ends
For decades, Indian engineers in the U.S. have lived in a state of semi-bondage. They could not easily change jobs, start businesses, or plan their futures because their immigration status was tied to their employers. As my research with the Kauffman Foundation showed, even in 2007 more than a million temporary workers and students were stuck waiting for a tiny allotment of green cards. Today the backlog exceeds 1.2 million Indians—some facing waits of half a century. Families have been trapped in limbo, unable to move forward.
The new fee makes that limbo untenable. No family will pay $100,000 per worker per year just to wait decades. Instead, many will do what they should have done long ago: declare independence. They will take their skills, their savings, and their experience back to India—or never leave in the first place.
As visas expire over the next three years, hundreds of thousands of highly skilled professionals will return home. These are mid-career engineers, scientists, doctors, and entrepreneurs, often with years of Silicon Valley training and substantial savings.
Innovation no longer needs Silicon Valley
When I first sounded the alarm in Immigrant Exodus, critics argued that serious innovation required Silicon Valley’s ecosystem. That may have been true in the 1990s. It is no longer.
I saw this firsthand. Building a company that required deep science and engineering talent was nearly impossible in the U.S. But when I visited IIT Madras, I was blown away by the talent, facilities, and ability to collaborate across disciplines. I was so impressed that I shifted development of breakthrough technologies for my company, Vionix Biosciences, to India.
It turned out to be a great decision—an example of what is to come. The Indian engineers did what Silicon Valley VCs told me could not possibly be done, they built an AI-powered diagnostic platform that replaces machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It analyzes samples in real time using non-thermal plasma and AI to decode spectral signatures. What American labs and even the U.S. Department of Defense had struggled with for years, Indian scientists delivered quickly and cost-effectively.
This required expertise across electrical engineering, plasma physics, thermodynamics, applied mathematics, biomedical instrumentation, and signal processing. These skills, increasingly scarce in Silicon Valley, are still taught and nurtured in India. Pair that talent with India’s scale of real-world data—from health to biometrics to digital infrastructure—and the country has conditions for exponential innovation.
Killing the golden goose
For decades, America’s prosperity has been fueled by immigrant brains. A quarter of all U.S. startups over the past three decades had at least one immigrant founder. In Silicon Valley, more than half did. Google, Intel, Tesla, and countless others were built by immigrants who first arrived on student visas or H-1Bs. Even Elon Musk once held an H-1B.
Trump’s policy suffocates this golden goose. By making it prohibitively expensive to hire foreign talent, he ensures that the next Google or Tesla will be founded elsewhere. The U.S., once the magnet for the world’s best and brightest, is driving them away.
India’s windfall—and work from anywhere
India stands to benefit as never before. Returnees will bring global experience, world-class skills, and often Silicon Valley stock options converted into capital. Many will keep working for U.S. employers—remotely from Gurgaon or Bangalore instead of Palo Alto or Hackensack. Remote work, normalized during the pandemic, has erased geography as a barrier. Global projects now follow the people.
Even India’s IT companies, which once feared losing contracts if visas dried up, no longer need to worry. The business will follow the engineers. If talent is in Bangalore or Hyderabad instead of New Jersey, that is where projects will be managed. Outsourcing has become “work-from-anywhere.” Trump’s tariffs may keep Indians out of American offices, but they cannot keep them off global Zoom calls or AI pipelines.
Others will strike out on their own, founding startups modeled on what they learned abroad but adapted to Indian realities. They will connect Indian teams to global markets, investors, and supply chains. They will also bring scars from battling America’s bureaucracy—scars that will fuel determination to build freer, more dynamic lives at home.
The economic impact will be profound. Tens of thousands of engineers suddenly free to start companies, hire teams, and raise capital could double India’s unicorn count within a decade—not through protectionism but through the infusion of talent America has repelled.
The irony is rich. For years, U.S. politicians accused India of “stealing jobs” through the H-1B program. Now America is handing India a treasure chest of talent, capital, and ambition. Trump may think he is protecting American workers. In reality, he is writing the next chapter of Immigrant Exodus. And this time, the winners will be in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune—not Silicon Valley.
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication
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