Comment by alephnerd

Indians in America aren't eligible for an E3 like Australians are.

Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.

The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.

For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).

Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.

[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...