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I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.
The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science
Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.
Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.
Yeah but once you're in charge of such a large organism it's just as much macroeconomic trends and the work of 1000s of random cogs than it is straight up 'Guy A is a great CEO since company did well, Guy B is bad CEO since company did poorly' when they're likely unable to meaningfully steer the ship. My personal experience with Indian skilled immigrants is that the main advantage they have over other groups is being superduper willing and proficient at 'playing the corporate game'. Aggressively gaming KPIs, driving to tick every box and get every possible ingroup referral when applying for roles and generally showing a great savvy at the game of bureaucracy. I was kind of amazed in University seeing how my overseas Indian friends would go about applying for graduateships/internships versus people from other cultures, in how it was systematized and how collaborative a front there seemed to be even from Indians of vastly different geographic origins.
Like corporate entryism is mostly bullshit fugazi busywork for HR so I'm not against the hustle, but I think that relentless targeting of the rules of engagement is the main reason for Indian success as immigrants. Moreso than 'brilliance at the task at hand' and like should it particularly offend me that some person who is a 9.5/10 at leetcode and resume optimization but a 6/10 coder gets the Google graduateship over a 7/10 coder who didn't ruthlessly squeeze out every edge to get their butt on the seat when the job's likely to be pointless floundering busywork anyways?
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