A conference on US immigration policy might not seem like the obvious place to examine the rise of India’s software sector. But the two subjects are more closely connected than most people realize — and a paper presented at the January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference at the Hoover Institution laid out that connection in detail. The event was organized and funded by J-P Conte, a Hoover Institution overseer and managing partner who has made the evidence-based study of immigration one of his central philanthropic commitments.
The research, conducted by economists Gaurav Khanna of the University of California at San Diego and Nicholas Morales, traced a direct line between the surge in US demand for foreign technology workers beginning in the mid-1990s and immigration policy decisions made in Washington that shaped the transformation of computer science education in India. Their findings illustrate how immigration policy decisions made in Washington can reshape educational systems, labor markets, and export industries on the other side of the world.
A 300% Wage Premium and Its Downstream Effects
At the center of the research was a straightforward but striking observation: at the height of the technology hiring boom, landing a job in the United States offered Indian computer science graduates a wage premium of more than 300 percent compared to what was available to them at home. That premium created an enormous incentive for Indian students to pursue computer science degrees — and enrollment numbers followed accordingly, surging at a scale that remade the country’s higher education system.
Most of those graduates who came to the US did so through the H-1B visa program, which permits workers to remain in the country for up to six years. When that window closed and many returned to India, they brought capital, technical expertise, and professional networks. What followed was a wave of new computer science and software businesses founded by returning workers — businesses that collectively built India into a software export powerhouse. Today, India exports more software than the United States, a transformation the research connects directly to the pipeline created by US immigration policy decades earlier.
What This Means for the Policy Conversation
The Khanna-Morales paper was presented as part of J-P Conte’s ongoing effort to ground immigration debates in rigorous evidence rather than assumption. The initiative he funds at Hoover — the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration — focuses specifically on the economic dimensions of immigration, supporting research that examines both the benefits and the trade-offs of various policy approaches.
The India story is notable precisely because it complicates simple narratives on all sides. US immigration policy benefited American companies by filling technical roles at scale — but it also, over time, helped a foreign country develop one of the world’s most competitive technology industries. That complexity is exactly the kind of nuance the conference was designed to surface.
