India’s hiring binge

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India’s hiring binge

The biggest companies in the United States are on a hiring spree in India. They are building hundreds of overseas office parks. These aren’t call centers — they’re offices for Indian professionals employed by global companies to perform advanced tasks that, not long ago, Americans would have carried out. There are already 1,800 of these centers, and the rate of growth is doubling. They will soon employ two million Indians.

President Trump wants to restore American manufacturing. He is preparing to impose tariffs on India, a move that he says will bring jobs back and close a $46 billion trade deficit.

But tariffs reduce trade by making goods more expensive; they don’t affect services or offshoring, the practice of hiring workers overseas. Visa restrictions are equally irrelevant. The roles at these new centers are not for immigrants. They’re for people who want to stay in India and work for American companies.

Today’s newsletter is about a new kind of offshore office park. Here, Indian workers are doing the kind of jobs that American workers envy — for American companies. We’ll cover the firms that are building them and the professionals who now staff them.

In the 1990s, banks and big tech companies realized they could send jobs to India, where wages are just a fraction of those paid in the United States. Many of these were positions Americans didn’t want to fill. Sweaty youngsters piled into rooms in the middle of the night to help American customers rebook their flights or learn whether warranties had expired.

Now the roles are more advanced, and the people holding them often have graduate degrees. Workers are analyzing medical scans, writing marketing pitches, balancing budgets and designing state-of-the-art microchips — the kind of work that used to put Americans in the top tax brackets.

It’s not just happening here. Japanese and British firms have set up offices in places like Mexico and Poland. But most of the multinationals are American, and most of these new centers are in India.

Why white-collar jobs move
America is reducing immigration, and its working-age population is shrinking. It’s harder than ever for companies to hire skilled workers. But the talent pool is nearly bottomless in India, which churns out roughly 10 times as many engineering degrees as the United States every year.

So all kinds of companies are converging on six English-speaking cities in India. They include huge firms like Cisco and Target, which has a Bengaluru campus roughly the size of its Minneapolis headquarters. Bank of America is in Chennai. Hundreds of smaller companies have rushed in elsewhere, too. A third of the companies in the Fortune 500 have centers like these across the country, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in India.

Workers there are managing publicity for new cellphone companies, developing apps, writing programs to detect fraud and, of course, hiring more employees for the same centers. I met one sight-impaired employee who was designing an interface that blind Americans will use to weigh and stamp packages.

The pandemic sped up this transition because remote work made national borders irrelevant. Paroma Chatterjee, the country’s chief executive of Revolut, an online banking company that started in Britain, said that Covid had showed the fallacy of tethering a job to a place.

In 2021, when Chatterjee and her colleagues at Revolut hired their first seven people in India, they couldn’t believe how adroit the newbies were. Same with the next seven. New hires were excelling in finance, marketing, engineering and even H.R. “Why shouldn’t we get this quality of talent, in India, to help us build out products for the rest of our various markets across the world?” she said her colleagues wondered.

The employees are ambitious, and they want to climb the ranks at American-based companies. They devise business plans and make decisions that affect operations around the world. The greatest difficulty, workers told me, is the time zone: It’s a pain to coordinate Zoom calls when California is twelve and a half hours behind India.

What happens next
Trump may one day retaliate against American companies hiring service workers abroad. Some firms won’t brag about it for fear of inviting a backlash. But it’s unclear what could disrupt them: All of Trump’s levies so far focus on imports and don’t touch this part of the economy.

Maybe Trump won’t notice. These high-wage, education-intensive positions aren’t the manufacturing jobs he promised to bring back.