Why IT pros prefer US to Europe?

is desperately wooing I. I loves A but has not yet admitted his love. But before I and A can come really close, B, G and J appear on the scene. A, seeing the competition, begins to coo passionately. B, G and J also turn on the heat.

This not a sneak preview of the latest Bollywood tearjerker. In this all too familiar plot, substitute I for Indian, A for America and B, G and J for Britain, Germany and Japan respectively. Yes! you've clicked it, the object of these love bytes is none other than the Indian software professional. In a globalised economy, unhindered by political borders, India is becoming a hot seat for international recruiters. European countries like Britain and Germany and the US and Japan have realised that the services of Indian software professionals are critical for maintaining a competitive edge in the globalised marketplace and are puling all stops to tap the Indian techie market. Consider these factoids:

Last week, in the midst of high-level talks to contain terrorism, British Home Secretary Jack Straw took time out to discuss new procedures for UK work visas with Home Minister Mr L.K. Advani. Last year, UK issued a record 1,58,000 visas to Indians.

Japanese Prime Minister Yosho Mori on his recent tour to India announced more Japanese work visas for IT professionals.

In March, this year, despite stern opposition from the Conservatives, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced a new immigration policy. According to the new policy, which came into force from August this year, the German government will be issuing 20,000 five-year-visas for IT specialists of non-European countries. It is estimated that seventy-five per cent of the visas are likely to be granted to Indians.

The US Immigration and Naturalisation Services has already begun to process H-1B visas for the next financial year and is expected to reach the 1,07,000 limit by December this year. Last year forty four per cent of the visas were issued to Indians.

With a backlog of vacancies growing in each country and an acute shortage of skilled technical professionals to fill them, Indian techies have probably never had it better. But despite a host of countries opening their gates wide to lure Indian techies, the Indian professional's hot destination continues to be the US. Joe Verghese, a senior executive with Assure Consulting states, "On a daily average, we process papers for five software professionals who apply for jobs to the US. But almost everyone who comes to seek job advice or a career change wants to go to the US. The other options hardly figure.

What is inspiring IT professionals to head for the US and why has Europe failed to evoke any palpable excitement among Indian techies? One obvious reason is that today, Indians constitute the epicenter of the Silicon Valley revolution. The success stories of entrepreneurs residing in the Bay area is the stuff dreams are made of. Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame, Rajiv Khosla of Sun Microsystems and Kanwal Rekhi, who sold his company Exclean to Novell for $210 million and founded The Indus Entrepreneurs, are modern heroes whose success stories are consecrated in the Valley's history. 

But they alone are not spearheading the revolution. A number of medium and small Indian players such as K Chandrashekar's Exodus, a company with a market capital of $20 billion which provides data centers to companies housing internet servers, Pradeep Sindhu's Juniper Networks, market cap $29 billion, specialising in Internet backbone routers and Suhas Patil's Cirrus Logic with market cap of $1 billion coupled with a host of other companies are fuelling the revolution.

According to conservative estimates, 40 per cent of the startups in Silicon Valley are Indian spawned. These stories are propelling IT wannabes to head straight for the US. Despite the fact that Indian software exports to Europe, during 1999-2000, reportedly touched $920 million, no country in Europe has been able to replicate or match the success of Silicon Valley, which may Indians now refer to as the Indus Valley. 

Silicon Valley is pervaded with a do or die spirit of free enterprise. The formula for success, "think big, work hard and the idea will become a reality" is not confined to prosy moral science lessons in the schoolroom. In comparison, European economies are being held hostage by their inability to shrug their image of being deeply conservative rigid, introverted, parochial and hierarchical societies, reflected in descriptive phrases like the tight upper lipped Britisher and the xenophobic German.

These are not imagined fears. Over the past one year, racist attacks against Indians in Germany have been on the rise. Juergen Ruttgers, a Christian Democrat candidate based his local election campaign on the slogan "Kinder statt Inder," which transalated means "children instead of Indians" should be trained for computer jobs. Such sloganeering echoes popular sentiment and has made Germany an attractive destination for Indians. In June this year, an Indian researcher was attacked in Lepizig by three Germans who also unleashed a ferocious dog on their victim. Not surprisingly, the hostility and the increasing incidence of racist violence has dissuaded Indians from opting for Germany. "Germans are suspicious and cold towards non-White immigrants," avers Anup Ray a marketing executive working with a software company, who has been on a posting to Germany. 

In contrast, the tangible success of the Indian community has forever changed the image of Indians in the United States. Fortune magazine, recently, dedicated a special section to Indian IT tzars and spoke in glowing terms about their "bold, brilliant and buoyant ventures". At present they are 200,000 Indians in the Bay area and they have formed an extended social and ethinic network in the Valley. Indians are a tight-knit community, they live in close proximity and hang out together. "It's an extended campus atmosphere," admits Sarat Kumar, a software professional settled in the Valley. The Indian mindset, which, till 50 years back, considered it a sin to cross the seas, views the Indian diphpora as a source of strength.

The visibility of Indians functions as a buffer for the inevitable alienation and rootlesness one feels on arrival. Most Indians have either close friends or relations in America, who solicitously take newcomers under their wing and mentor them till they can find their way on their own. But relations are not restricted to social connectivity. According to Siliconindia magazine (reflect on the name) Indians invest in one another's companies, sit on one another's boards and hire each other in key jobs. For instance, Reikhi's TiE, called the Valley's Godfather, has poured millions into more than 45 startups founded by Indians. Rekhi reportedly spends two days of the week, Thursday and Friday, meeting Indians who want to talk about the companies they've started. 

These advantages are augmented by the absence of linguistic barriers on the journey onward America. Most middle class Indians have access to an English education. In mainland Europe, the cultural alienation is accentuated and reinforced by the linguistic divide. English is neither the mainstream nor the second language in Europe. It takes an average three to four months to acquire the basics of a foreign language, the life span of a short-term project for an IT pro going to the US. In today's fast-paced result-oriented economy, where time is virtually measured in terms of money, investments for learning language could be alternately termed a lock-up period for talent. Besides, there is no guarantee that a visa would be granted to the professional who has put his US trip on hold for a stint in Europe or Japan. The career risks are far too great for a professional to undertake. Recognising this, Germany has expunged the clause, wherein it is necessary for a foreigner to know the language. But as German is the language of the social circuit, an Indian abroad, who does not know the language, is bound to experience a fierce degree of isolation.

Moreover, US employers, hot on the trail of the best talent in the world, offer far more competitive salaries. US employers, who apply for H-IBs, must guarantee that they will follow industry wide standards and offer H-IB employees the same access to benefits that are employed to similarly employed US workers. Software companies must pay $ 60,000 per annum to avoid trouble with the Department of Labour. Germany guarantees a minimum salary of 100,000 marks (or $48, 000) per year. The salaries in UK are far lower. The minimal annual salary ranges between pounds 15,000 and 20,000 ($ 26,000 and 30,000 respectively). According to a quality of life survey conducted by consultants William Mercer in January 2000 , with New York as the base city scoring 100 points, London was the most expensive city in the European Union scoring 106.9 on the index. 

The clinching factor is the possibility of acquiring a green card, a prestigious social symbol in India, if one is a regular reader of matrimonial columns. Germany, unfortunately, does not recognise these social niceties. Unlike the US, where a five year stay, by and large, guarantees a citizenship, European governments are not as generous in granting permanent passage.

Thus, for now, it is advantage America. In the job market, where the scales are tilted in favour of the supplier, and each economy is greedily coveting the same labour force, the country which will stoop to conquer will eventually win. Turn this mantra around and you will hit upon the title of this article.

*The views expressed here are that of the author.

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