Modi’s Global Jobs Push: How India Is Sending Workers Abroad as Immigration Doors Close

Hello, Priyanka Salve here, reaching you from Singapore.

Welcome back to “Inside India“ — your essential guide to the biggest stories and shifts shaping the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

In the past 10 years, China has managed to turn its brain drain into a brain gain, drawing large numbers of talented professionals back home to support its emergence as a global technology force.

India, however, is pursuing a very different path. Rather than focusing primarily on bringing talent back, it is helping more of its large and youthful labor force move abroad. This week, I look at why New Delhi is striking mobility agreements with several trade partners at a time when resistance to immigration is intensifying in many parts of the world.

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From Europe and New Zealand to Russia and the Middle East, agreements that make it easier for workers to move across borders are increasingly appearing in India’s latest trade arrangements with partner countries.

The push is being shaped by limited domestic prospects for highly skilled workers in a country with one of the world’s biggest working-age populations. At the same time, India’s growing dependence on remittances to support its finances is giving the government added incentive to create overseas pathways for its workforce.

India’s situation contrasts sharply with China’s rise as a manufacturing giant, where industrial expansion created employment on a massive scale. India, by comparison, has struggled to overcome what Jayant Krishna, senior fellow and chair on India and emerging Asia Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described to CNBC as the “grave challenge” of unemployment remaining around 5% to 6%.

“If we add under-employed people, the rate jumps up alarmingly,” Krishna said, adding that by placing skilled and semi-skilled workers in overseas markets, India manages “the aspirations of our ever-expanding working-age population.”

India’s government has become increasingly reliant on money sent home by its overseas workers, receiving the highest amount of remittances globally, equal to roughly 3% of its GDP, experts said.

But this policy doesn’t come without resistance, especially at a time when anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise across the world. Last week, Prime Minister of New Zealand Christoper Luxon hailed the country’s free trade deal with India that also enhances labor mobility for Indian workers.

“You have enriched our country economically, socially and culturally,” Luxon told a crowd of Indian diaspora in Auckland. But the deal, which is awaiting final clearance from parliament, faces strong opposition from coalition members of Luxon’s government.

The country’s Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, in a post on X, said the trade deal with India is creating “unprecedented immigration settings” and will make it harder for “kiwis finding jobs.” Months earlier, Shane Jones, a minister in the Luxon government and a member of Winston’s party, NZ First, said the deal would lead to a “butter chicken tsunami” coming to New Zealand.

Modi’s recent visit to Australia – where India overtook the England as the top country for Australians born overseas last year – also sparked anti-India protests. Australian social media personality Hugo Lennon heckled Modi in Melbourne, shouting, “No more Indians! This Country is for Australians,” according to local media reports.

Meanwhile, the U.S., one of the biggest recipients of Indian workers, is tightening visa rules even as negotiations are ongoing for a trade deal with New Delhi. Washington’s move has only given India an added incentive to strike labor mobility deals to export workers to Russia, Israel and the European Union, and Finland earlier this year.

The U.S. created H-1B visas in 1990 and they’re used heavily by U.S. tech giants to bring in highly skilled workers from overseas. India has been, by far, the biggest recipient of H-1B visas, but the Trump administration is trying to drastically reduce the country’s reliance on the scheme.

India observed the vicissitudes of H-1B politics in the U.S. and “drew the evident lesson: do not leave your diaspora’s access to foreign labor markets hostage to another nation’s domestic politics,” Ronak D. Desai, visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told CNBC.

“Mobility grounded in treaty is politically far more durable than mobility granted by unilateral visa policy,” he added.

India’s move to export labor stands in sharp contrast to its fellow billion-plus-people neighbor, China, which has seen a flood of returnees in the last decade, partly due to the geopolitical tensions that led to the expulsion of Chinese scientists from the U.S.

China has a term for the phenomenon: Haigui, literally, a “returning from across the sea,” according to the Boym Institute think tank.

“Haigui” has seeded its semiconductor, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence sectors, experts said, adding that Beijing also created the domestic capacities to absorb this highly skilled talent.

“Professionals with portable skills have been extremely valuable to help China’s technological advancement,” Rafiq Dossani, adjunct senior Economist at RAND Corporation, told CNBC.

While Beijing offers both incentives to return and infrastructure, India lacks the ability to spur development of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, he added.

India spends about half of one percent of its GDP on research and development, lower than the global average of 1.7% and significantly below the over 3.5% spent by the U.S.

In the absence of comparable opportunities in India, the Modi government does not see “brain drain” as a major concern, Pramit Chaudhuri, South Asia practice head at Eurasia Group, said.

Rather, they are choosing to promote it, he added. 

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