Comment by alephnerd

I think (or I hope) what they mean is long-term.

For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS.

That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it).

More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch.

If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term.

As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective).

This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.