ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to provide a political economy analysis of the international mobility of Indian technical professionals. As noted in Chapter 4, Indians are very visible in the USA, and their presence is significant in high-tech industries, especially under the two employer-sponsored visa categories, the H1B and L1. In addition, Indian students over time have been contributing to the stock of American technical professionals. In Japan, the number of foreigners is small and the presence of Indians is comparatively minuscule. However, the small share of Indians to total foreign population in Japan reveals the high ratio of high-skilled Indian professionals relative to the total number of Indians in Japan when compared to all other nationalities in Japan. The unskilled from India do not seek Japan as a source of remittance income because Japan is relatively closed to foreigners in general and unskilled workers in particular. However, to explain the asymmetric relationship between India and Japan, given that India is one of the largest senders of people and professionals to the world economy and a major exporter of software services while Japan is the second largest IT market, two interrelated questions must be addressed. First, why does India generate such a high volume of technical talent, given that India is an impoverished economy? Second, what keeps such talent out of Japan for the most part?
