Moving back to India from the perspective of a US citizen kid.

Reason for this post - There has been an uptick in the number of Indians (first gen) going back to India. Lots of posts discussing the pros and cons of parents raising kids in India vs. the USA, but there are no perspectives of second generation Indian immigrants (who are the kids in this story of moving back to India) on the same topic. *For most practical purposes the US could be replaced by any first world country in this post in case you are not in the US.* *Warning - long post* *TLDR* - Speaking anecdotally and from my own personal experience, I would definitely say that people generally prefer growing up in the US over growing up in India. If parents still want to move back to India, please ensure that you at least have kids in the US before moving back so that they at least get a US citizenship. Please talk to the kids of families who have already moved back to India and see how they're doing; spoiler alert - do not move if you have teenage kids. My intro - I am a 23 y/o male US citizen with Indian parents. My parents moved to the US in 1995 and I was born in 1998. They moved back to India permanently in 2000. I grew up and did my undergrad in India. I shifted back to the US last year after graduating for my job in tech. This puts me in a good position in terms of being able to comment on whether kids should grow up in the US or India. This post is very anecdotal, I do not have any research to back my claims up. Here are the sources of all my anecdotes - 1. Me (obviously), 2. Parents' friends'/relatives' kids who were also raised partly in India (migrating was much easier in the 90s it seems), 3. My college friends with US/UK citizenship who also grew up in India (I studied in a top university in India - think IIT/NIT tier - that has a separate admissions quota for foreign born students; my batch had ~40 such students). If I could go back in time and convince my parents not to move back to India, I definitely would. The decision to move back to India was taken when I was a toddler and by the time I was of age to even comprehend the implications of the move, it was over a decade of having permanently stayed in India, which is as permanent as it could get. I also know that the move back to India was not due to visa issues that my parents were facing. I also got to know a couple of years ago that my dad had received job offers in several first world countries (US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada and NZ) over time after moving back to India, some as recently as 2020 which he declined all to stay in India. So this was not a single decision that happened over 20 years ago and they did not have an opportunity to look at their choice again, this was an active choice made over a couple of decades so that they could stay closer to their parents/relatives and so that they could raise their kid in India. These are the exact same reasons I see being used now online on these posts that have popped up recently. Education is the biggest reason, but there are some issues that will only get exacerbated with time. Although I agree that I am probably going to be of a different generation as a 23 y/o as compared to someone who had a kid in the US recently, I think this post still holds true for the most part even for the much younger kids. India has developed a lot in the last couple of decades and it is only going to continue to do so over the next few decades. Although I love India and would not wish for anything other than India becoming a first world country, I do not believe it is going to happen any time soon. There are some unfortunate problems that India innately has that are very hard to resolve. Education is the biggest problem to resolve in India. This is seen at all levels of education. The institutes are not at all on the same level. As a college graduate from a top-IIT level college, trust me when I say that college education in India is utter crap. Undergrad is getting very expensive in India, especially more so for foreign-born kids. The latest batch of NRI students in my college will have to pay out ~40/50 Lakhs INR which is not at all worth it for the kind of shit education that is imparted. And it is only going to increase more and more as the number of Indians who have gone abroad over the last couple of decades has increased and all of these people will be returning back to India with kids. Don’t even get me started on the education for students who want to pursue non-STEM courses. Even for students wanting to pursue medicine and then move abroad the path is getting harder as a plain MBBS degree is no longer accepted in the US for a doctor license. No comment on anyone pursuing master’s degree/PhD in India. After having studied in a top institute in India, I have lost all respect to anyone pursuing post-graduation in India. All these come only after securing an admission in college. The Indian engineering exams have definitely been the worst experience of my life. I am not kidding when I say that I would rather take a bullet to the head instead of having to go through that torturously excruciating experience. I am sure that a lot of you parents have had to go through the same hoops to reach the position you are in now, please think at least a hundred times as to whether you would want to have your kids go through the same again. For pre-college education the story is better with international schools popping up even in some tier-2 cities in India. But from what I understand, these are as expensive as paying for very expensive universities in India. So be ready to pay out a bomb; from what I hear, some pre-kg schools charge in lakhs INR per year, it only increases with time and age of the kids. I would not recommend anything less than an international school having studied in one such school. Please let your kids study in a good school where the teachers are sane and actually care about your kids and not in local schools. Being close to family is highly overrated. There, I said it. I am someone who has grown up with cousins always around me. Once my parents moved out a bit farther away, I still visited my relatives and cousins once a week till covid struck. So trust me when I say that growing up with cousins and relatives are not at all what they seem to be. As parents you will definitely have a better support system which are always better, but even more so during hard times. But from the perspective of the kids, I do not believe that it matters to them whether they grow up with their cousins all around them. Your kids will turn out fine even if they get to meet their cousins once a year or so. They will still be pretty close in this day and age with technology growing. From the point-of-view of a kid, it makes no sense to move just to stay closer to relatives. Once a year is definitely more than enough visit time. Moving/migrating is a much simpler process when kids are young and takes a smaller toll on the kids if they are younger Also no issues when the kids are grown up and have finished college; the problems arise when the kids are in their teenage. I have loads and loads of these anecdotes, stating the ones that give different perspective and are from different countries as well (so the story is very similar no matter which country) - Parents’ friends living in Singapore wanted to move back to India when their kids were 10 & 15 y/o. They were especially in a hurry as Singapore has a mandatory conscription for children who finish their schooling there. The entire family of 4 moved back to India and the elder kid hated it so much that the dad & the elder kid moved back to Singapore within a year even with the mandatory military service issue they had. Happy ending for younger kid and wife in India? No, younger kid didn’t like two of the schools that they tried in India, they ended up moving back to Singapore a few years later. Both the kids will serve the Singapore military before they settle down permanently now. Relative lived in Switzerland for a couple of stints. First stint was when their kid was very young so the two moves (shifting to Switzerland and shifting back to India) did not affect my cousin at all. The second time they moved to Switzerland was a few years later. Moved back to India during the kid’s 7th grade and it was very rough. Kid had lots of health issues in India, schooling system and method of teaching was very different even though it was a top school in the tier-1 city (non-international), even though they stayed very close to family, it was hard for her to gel with her cousins as she was completely Swiss for all practical purposes. The first 3 years were very painful, but after 7 years now she is doing completely fine. Although this story has a happy ending, it was at the expense of my cousin’s childhood years. Family friend moved back to India from Germany when their kids were 5 & 7, the process was much much easier than the previous anecdotes. Kids were too young to understand what was going on and they got lucky with finding a good school. But they have to stay in a tier-1 city and cannot move to their hometown. Thankfully for them the hometown is only half a day’s drive. Both the kids are teenagers and are doing fine now. Relative moved back to India from the UK once their kids’ graduation were completed in the UK. The kids continued to live in the UK, they visit their parents once a year. The parents are happily retired in India and have the life they had dreamed of in India. Parents’ friends moved to Bangalore after getting their citizenship in Australia. The getting the citizenship part hurt their single child a lot as they were only able to get the citizenship once their kid was halfway through 9th grade. They moved back for their kid’s 10th grade. The kid was somehow able to make it through 10th grade in India, but is currently in his 12th grade and is completely depressed all the time. He lost all his friends from school and is not able to cope up with Indian education. The kid is not stupid/dumb, he’s a very smart chap who used to do very well in school in Australia. The parents are thinking of sending him to Australia for college as we convinced them not to force the kid to study somewhere he is depressed and unable to reach his true potential. Moral of the stories? DO NOT MOVE IF YOUR KID IS IN BETWEEN 8TH GRADE AND UNDERGRAD. Indian education is a death-blow to such kids. Indian activities in the USA - A lot of people say that they want their kids to grow up learning about their motherland and learn their culture. My parents wanted the same for me and this was one of the reasons they moved back to India. Guess what? All the Indian kids who grew up in the US are more attached to their culture than most kids my age in India. It's funny how people talk about culture only when they are abroad and not when back in India. I know more second generation immigrants who have learnt Indian dance forms and Indian musical instruments than Indians who have learnt it in India. They are definitely more Indian than Indians themselves. Indian kids are obsessed with American culture and trust me when I say this, it is only going to get worse. With the advent of technology, Indian kids have seen the freedom and independence that comes with being an American, there is no turning back anymore. The exodus is only going to explode more. The point of water/air-quality is non-existent for now. But the future predictions show that India is unfortunately going to have a massive problem in this regards. The problem can already be seen in some places, but it is definitely not bad enough for people to rethink their move back to India. It will not be that was for a couple of decades for sure, but it is only going to get worse from now. It is an exponentially growing problem and will become the biggest problem India faces eventually. And at that time I do think that anybody would like to be stuck on the wrong side. There were ~40 non-Indians in my college born to parents who moved back to India. Of the 40 students, 20 of them are already back in the US within the first 1 year of graduation. I know that 7-8 more are planning to move soon as well. Thankfully these people do not have to shell out a bomb for their master’s degrees and can get a job right away due to their citizenships. It is unfortunately not the case for the Indian citizen batchmates of mine. Already a large number of them are abroad and a lot more are planning to get their master’s within the next couple of years. A lot of my alumni (4-5 years at least older than I am) are using the company internal transfers to move abroad within the same companies as well. The number of people wanting to move abroad from a top college in India is astonishingly high (albeit this has been the case for decades now; but surprising to see even after seeing so much development and drastic increase in high-paying jobs in the last few years; I know people working at Uber for ~35 Lakhs INR as NEW-GRADS who have made it their life goal to move to the USA). The number of opportunities in India are growing daily and the country is growing in terms of quality of life. I do not blame any of you for wanting to move back to India, after all it is our home country. But there are some larger things at play which we do not control and some of them cannot be stopped even with the $$$ that people have accumulated here. The point of this post is not to belittle your choices, but to make you give a deeper thought on the choices one makes as a parent. Most of the times it looks like the parents have their own vision of how the move back to India will go (completely rosy), but most of the time nobody takes the perspective of the kid into account (obviously since such accounts are hard to come by). Please talk to kids of similar age (8th grader is NOT the same as 12th grader) who have undergone such a move. Read carefully - talk to the KIDS themselves, the parents will obviously give a distorted view of how the move went - Indian parents are very bad at judging the mental health of their kids. The move back to India could definitely go well, especially for kids who are non-teenagers or are already in their 20s, but it is unfathomably difficult for teenagers during such moves. Do not be selfish and be ready to move back in case your kids cannot handle it well. Give them some time, try switching schools in case it does not work out but anything more than that you are morally obligated to move back. Personally as a kid, I would trade having had better education and freedom while also getting away from the competition-hellhole by growing up in the US over staying close to relatives in India. Having spent a little more than a year in the US, I have decided that I will definitely be staying in the US permanently and do not mind sponsoring my parents a Green Card in case they change their mind. I may rethink this choice a couple of decades from now when my parents' health might become a problem, but for now I am staying along with all the people who I have spoken to as US citizens who grew up in India. My final suggestion is that in case you still decide to move back to India, it would be highly beneficial to get your kids a citizenship in the US before moving back just so that they have the choice of easily moving in case they do not see eye-to-eye in terms of your decision of location of settling down. All the best and please do right by your kids. They are the ones who will be most affected by such migration, it is your duty as parents to ensure that they have a say in such decisions. I hope everything works out. PS - Feel free to reach out to me in case you would like to talk more about something in specific as I have only glossed over most topics here to keep the post as short as possible. Blind tax - $160k #India #US #Immigration #Kids #RaisingKids #misc