Early in the process of reporting for BusinessWeek's High-Tech Sweatshops story, I spent some time in New Jersey talking to software programmers, outsourcers, and members of the Indian business community. In fact, to get the Indian-American point of view, I attended a meeting of the Asian Indian Chamber of Commerce one afternoon at the invitation of Seema Singh, a lawyer who is the organization's president. The Indian business people I met there are in an uncomfortable spot. Many of them have been living in the United States for years, and many are American citizens. So they want the United States to succeed; they want their children to have abundant job prospects; they want India to succeed, and for Indians to get full access to the benefits of globalization.

The chamber confab was held at Royal Albert's Hotel, a large white stucco building architected to look like a maharaja's palace. It's on the outskirts of Edison, a town in central New Jersey that's the epicenter of Indian culture in the state. Royal Albert's Hotel is set on a bluff overlooking a handful of warehouses. There's a 20-foot-tall status of Indian freedom fighter Sardar Patel out front, and, down in the basement, where the chamber meeting was held, there are elaborately decorated rooms that are typically used for weddings and coming-of-age "thread" ceremonies for Indian and Indian-American boys.
I got a friendly welcome from 30-or-so participants. They were happy to give me their reactions to the controversy over outsourcing and guest worker visas.

Ashok Nagrath, the owner of World Wide Connections Inc., told me that the company had once had 60 employees, but business had dwindled so much that he now that he stopped operating. "There's very little work today, so we're dormant," he said. For him and his company, the Internet changed everything: "It was the death to distance." He doesn't fault India Inc. for the demise of his business, however. And he thinks the US Congress is making a mistake by trying to curtail the offshoring of labor and the use of H-1B visas. "I'm affected by offshoring, but I think it's still the best thing for America," he said. "The US should encourage it, to get the best minds and make them American customers." Concerning guest workers, he said: "They bring in the new thoughts and energy. They pay taxes and contribute to the country."

Kumar Balani, publisher of the magazine Biz India, told me that native Americans should take the holistic view. Products they want to buy can cost less if American companies cut costs and become more competitive by using offshore labor. The challenge for Americans is to acquire more skills and be more creative. "Everybody in the world is under pressure to make themselves more valuable," he said.

Satish Bhalerao, owner of Network Solution, was unapologetic about using guest workers in the US and offshore labor in India. His customers want to reduce costs, and he offers them a lower-cost alternative. He said he pays guest workers in the United States the same as he does native American workers, but he prefers to hire Indians on visas. "They're easily trainable. They're motivated to work hard because they want to live here and to find a way to stay here," he said. But he also worried about America's future. America has already lost so much manufacturing, and now it's losing the lead in science. "Our research is gone. What are we going to offer the world?" he asked.

James Rajiv Bhasin has seen offshoring from both sides. As an employee of Chase in 2003, he lost his job when a lot of the company's work was outsourced to India. Now he's the general manager of business development at Upstream, a subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services, which performs finance and accounting work in India for US clients. "I was shocked when I lost my job at Chase, but I recovered," he said. "I had to reinvent myself. In six years I've done so much more than I ever would have done if I stayed at Chase." Bhasin started his job at Intelenet late last year. He was surprised to realize that it was the company to which he had lost his job six years ago. His new boss is the guy who managed the outsourcing project at Chase. "It amazes me. I've gone full circle," he said.

As I think back on the Indian-Americans I met that night, I can't help but contrast the kinds of things they said--and the unemotional way they said them--to many of the angry and even ugly comments we got on our High-Tech Sweatshops story after it was published online. It was disturbing to see workers from different nationalities verbally tearing at one another. The situation is reminiscent of earlier eras in American history, when employers played immigrants of different ethnicities against each other to defeat labor unions and keep wages low. Like them, today’s guest workers and American programmers are pawns in somebody else’s game.