In India’s most advanced cities, American companies are racing to set up more and bigger offshore campuses: fully staffed offices with high-skilled Indian professionals, performing functions vital to global business.
The concentration is most stark in bits of Bengaluru. Apul Nahata of RapidAI, a Silicon Valley-based medical technology company that uses artificial intelligence to interpret brain scans, can look out the window of the office he leads in India and see a “density of companies” relevant to his work.
“If I walk a half-kilometer, I see Google, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Visa, Samsung and Amazon right here,” said Mr. Nahata, who spent 10 years of his career in California. He is especially tuned in to his neighbors in tech, but JPMorgan Chase has the biggest of these offices, with 55,000 workers spread across Bengaluru and four other Indian cities. Even all-American retailers like Target and Lowe’s have centers employing 4,000 to 5,000 Indians in Bengaluru.
Under President Trump, the United States is upending some of its most important trading partnerships. He is particularly irritated by the $46 billion U.S. deficit in the trade of goods with India. Mr. Trump has also complained about undocumented Indian workers.
But Mr. Trump’s stated policy solutions — higher U.S. tariffs meant to force India to lower its trade barriers, and the deportations of immigrants — will do nothing to slow the evolution of the long partnership that binds together American companies looking for skilled workers overseas and India’s abundant pool of labor.
Twenty years ago, many Americans feared that the outsourcing of office jobs to lower-wage economies like India would mean fewer jobs in the United States. Many kinds of jobs have moved overseas since then, and many of those have since been automated. But the American economy needs more skilled workers.
