Collaborative Grant: Maintaining Diversity in the US High-Tech Sector

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This is a collaborative project that will comparatively evaluate the experiences of expatriated Indian industrial information-technology and bio-technology engineers, those who stay in the US and those that migrate back to India. The researchers will acquire pertinent primary data by conducting in-depth interviews with 60 returned Indian engineers and scientists, and then compare that with the experiences of 60 Indian engineers and scientists currently employed in the US industrial sector; they will also interview some Indian entrepreneurs who have returned to India to start their own companies. The results of this research will be disseminated through publications in journals, and by presenting at conferences. They will serve to deepen the bonds between the US and India as they build upon their national resources and expertise toward furthering joint research. They will be integrated into graduate and undergraduate courses on human resource management, workforce diversity, and industrial policy. In addition, the researchers will employ students from under-represented groups. Their institution is one of only two universities in the nation that is both a Minority Serving Institution and a Carnegie Very High Research Activity university; it has a large Hispanic student and Native American student population. The project has two distinct aims: To understand why industrial engineers and scientists return to their home country, and to develop theoretical understanding of changes in the social construction of nationality with transnational migration. They will meet these aims using qualitative methods, as indicated above, and their results will serve to complement existing models of return migration, which overwhelmingly focus on the economic impacts. The researchers claim that it is important to include social, professional, and political experiences that help shape these decisions. The findings of this study will potentially inform research on human capital, science and technology development, transnational migration, and immigration patterns and policies. With national borders becoming invisible in the world of science and technology, the researchers expect to show that the process of return migration among engineers and scientists is anything but a zero sum game. This study complements an earlier NSF supported study by this collaborative team of foreign-born academic engineers and scientists who returned to India after working and living in the US.