The United States remains the No. 1 destination for immigrant high-tech workers. But with U.S. visa quotas running out quickly each year, international recruitment efforts are increasing the flow of Indian software engineers to countries other than the United States.

Austria, Australia, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom have all sought to recruit Indian software engineers. Many have either sent senior government officials here on recruiting trips or have told visiting Indian ministers of their domestic industries' plans to hire more Indian nationals.

The need for software engineers is being fueled by technology development around the world and the globalization of the electronics industry. The shortage has touched off a lengthy and bitter debate in the United States about whether U.S. companies are importing cheap labor from overseas, thereby depriving experienced U.S. engineers of well-paid jobs in the high-tech sector.

Pramod Mahajan, India's minister for information technology, recently said New Delhi would not act to prevent Indian software engineers from going abroad. Instead, Mahajan said the government would increase software education and training opportunities within India.

U.S. observers had differing views on whether it's beneficial for India to become a supplier of software specialists.

"If India wants to be a world competitor, it's got a long ways to go. They should keep the top people who have these skills," said Merrill Buckley, president of the Washington-based IEEE-USA. "Many of the people from India that I meet through the international IEEE meetings don't want to see these people leave their country."

Positions of influence

Others, however, feel that India will gain from exporting programmers and engineers."The governments of the main H-1B-exporting countries welcome the emigration of its programmers," said Norm Matloff, a Univeristy of California at Davis computer science professor who is an outspoken supporter of H-1B visas. '"They hope to get their emigres positions of influence in the U.S. and other foreign countries; the emigres send home needed hard currency; they sometimes found U.S. firms which often invest in branches in the home country. The industry lobbyists have already been making this pitch, 'Get the Indians here before Germany grabs them.' "

Germany, which is preparing to launch a program similar to the U.S. H-1B visa program, moved first by sending a project manager from its Industrial Investment Council on a tour of India to explain an initiative that will allow up to 20,000 non-European Union technical workers to find long-term jobs in Germany. Germany's IT Green Card initiative is scheduled to start Aug. 1. The immigration program will allow Indian software professionals to work in Germany for up to five years.

Krishna Pinpati, founder of the German-based software firm Euro-Prisma and one of the executives invited by the German Parliament to discuss its work permit regulations, said his company will launch a broad recruiting campaign in India to promote career opportunities in Germany. The campaign will also stress the advantages for Indian engineers of working overseas.

Germany's Chamber of Commerce and Industry is also planning a campaign to promote Germany as a preferred destination for Indian software engineers.

Other countries seeking Indian expertise are not far behind the German effort. Catalyst, a recruitment firm in Ireland, has been touring the southern Indian cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad to recruit engineers.

"Companies around the world are in a hurry to embrace the info-tech revolution, and traditional brick-and-mortar companies are extending their businesses to include e-commerce. All this has created a large global demand for skilled software professionals," said Dewang Mehta, president of India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). "Indian software engineers can address this skill shortage."

During the recent launch of Project INIT (Indo-Italian IT cooperation) in Rome, Italian officials told Nasscom executives that the project hopes to attract at least 100 Indian software training personnel to help train Italian technicians. In return, the country pledged to help Indian companies in Italy while maintaining a liberal policy on foreign worker permits.

The fact that English is widely spoken in India adds to the attractiveness of Indian engineers, who in turn stand to make much higher wages working overseas than they could at home. With the United States still the top destination for Indian programmers, European recruiters must still hustle to promote the advantages of working in their countries.

Preferred destination

"I would prefer any day to go to work in the U.S. than to work in any other country," said Ramesh Ottur, a software engineer with telecommunications company Subex Systems (Bangalore). Ottur's is a common sentiment within the tight-knit Indian software community.

There were 340,000 software engineers employed in India at of the end of March, and 80,000 have been joining the ranks each year, thanks to the explosive growth of the software industry here. "While the good news is that there is no immediate shortage of software workers in India for the next two to three years, the market can become tight [if] immediate steps are not taken," Mehta said.

"India's brain drain is our brain gain," said Paul Donnelly, organizer of the Immigration Reform Coalition, a U.S. Web-based group hoping to replace H-1B visas with green cards. "India recognizes that sending their best and brightest here benefits them too. But those benefits depend on a U.S. passport — the entrepreneurs who open trade between the two countries or return to start businesses in India aren't H-1Bs, they're naturalized citizens or people with green cards who can travel freely."

— Additional reporting by Terry Costlow.