Depends on the kind of candidate. The brain drain already kind of started reversing in the 2008-12 period during those layoffs, and Indian tech salaries caught up with Eastern Europe (and the US at the top end of the bracket) by the early 2020s.

A large portion of Indians who came to the US on an H1B over the last decade basically came to the US in order to use the American experience to paper over issues with their resumes (eg. Didn't major in CS, didn't attend an INI, worked at a WITCH) causing their careers to stagnate.

Being in the US still conveys bragging rights, but increasingly the older generations recognize that someone immigrating abroad will basically almost never meet their parents again aside for a couple weeks a year.

As such, the name of the game now is to work in the US for a couple years and then become a PM Director or Director of Engineering at a GCC in India.

Additionally, Indian founders in the US have started considering IPOing in Indian equity markets instead of the US because the tech IPO market is (edit: relatively) dead here in North America (especially if you cannot show $400M+ in revenue) but showing $50M-$100M can guarantee you a $500M-$2B IPOs like Pine Labs' listing a couple days ago. There are at least 25 Indian startups in the process of IPOing this year [0] and the trend is continuing [1].

So for entrepreneurial Indians, the US is slowly starting to lose it's shine.

And finally, as an Indian STEM academic in the US, you can get a $100K public-private startup grant if you move your lab to India, and INIs in India (the Indian equivalent of Double First Class universities in China) allow academic staff to work with private sector players without demanding convluted IP partnerships. Thus, a lot of American-educated Indian academics in India are also becoming angel and seed investors, and have helped guide startups into YCombinator or raising a round from an Accel.

From a European perspective, the best example would probably be the reverse brain drain Poland and Czechia saw in the 2016-19 period, Israel in the early 2000s, and China in the 2010s.

[0] - https://inc42.com/features/indian-startup-ipo-tracker-2025/

[1] - https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/will-indias-i...

There were 165 IPOs in the U.S. public markets in the first half of 2025. This was 76% higher than the 94 IPOs in the first half of 2024 and is estimated to be 47% higher than the total number of IPOs in 2024 when annualized for the full year of 2025.

Far from being basically dead