India, Feb. 9 -- In 2009, I moved to Silicon Valley to study immigrant entrepreneurship. As an immigrant myself, I wanted to understand why people like me were so successful at building technology companies in the US, and what the rest of the world could learn from this. At the time, Silicon Valley was still the centre of the technology universe.

I was building on the work of UC Berkeley professor AnnaLee Saxenian, whose research fundamentally changed how scholars and policymakers understood global talent flows. Her research showed that immigrants founded roughly a quarter of Silicon Valley startups, led at the time by Taiwanese entrepreneurs, with Indians close behind. When I updated her work, I found that what began in Silicon Valley h...