Researchers in the US led by Vivek Wadhwa, yesterday’s entrepreneur and today’s columnist and academician, last week released the fourth part of a study to explain immigrant movements into and out of the US. Titled, “America’s Loss is the World’s Gain,” the Kauffman Foundation study is a feeble attempt to understand or explain what still may be a significant phenomenon.

I call it feeble because it has preferred to go the LinkedIn route – surveying 1,203 members of the large online network of professionals – to draw its conclusions and has limited itself to reaffirming, as opposed to validating, anecdotal observations. Still, the study is no less interesting, not least because the phenomenon – if indeed it is that – may have huge implications.

One of the first things the study demolishes is a belief, voiced notably by Wadhwa in many of his journalistic writings, that restrictive US immigration policies have been an important factor in the return of many immigrants to their native countries. “We find that, though restrictive immigration policies caused some returnees to depart the United States, the most significant factors in the decision to return home were career opportunities, family ties, and quality of life,” the study observes.

A second conclusion is intriguing: Nearly 40% of the Indians surveyed said they would turn down offers to return to the US even if they are offered Green Cards and jobs equivalent to the ones they now held in India. This, probably, validates ads aired in India over the past two years that variously depict a man tearing up his US job offer and in another celebrating a US visa rejection.

This – the rejection of the US by immigrants who have in previous centuries enriched the country – has gripped people like Wadhwa who believe the country will lose its competitiveness over the long run if it cannot attract the best brains from all across the world. Consequently, these Americans urge broader policies that will avert such an outcome because immigration is no longer an effective policy tool.

The study overlooks an important element, in my opinion. How many of the people who returned to India also packed their bags and went back to the US? This study has only surveyed people who have returned from the US and still reside in India, but not many others who have also returned to the US.

Since anecdotal evidence forms a large part of the study, I would offer some, too. If you have lived in Bangalore, more than in any other Indian city, you would know that many who returned from the US have gone back because of an inability to cope with Indian cities.

In the apartment complex I used to live, I have seen – over a period of four years – at least half a dozen families who came from the US with the hope of making a permanent home but then have returned to the US. The reasons varied but almost always quality of life was an issue – the same factor that ironically pulled immigrants back to India, according to the Kaufmann study.

Quality of life is not easy to define but it could be argued that Indian cities offer poorer standards when compared with any city in the US. Many Indian families that returned to India went back to the US because they couldn’t cope with traffic, congestion, insufficient access to recreational facilities including parks, and other lifestyle issues, not to mention a variety of other civic amenities and the general political system.