Don't Send For The Cavalry, These Indians Play Cricket

12/30/1997

Eric Ellis in Fremont, California, finds a shift in Silicon Valley away from the traditional American immigrant dream.

AT FIRST glance, one could be excused for thinking the Indian National Congress of California was an umbrella body representing the interests of Native Americans.

Second glance could further confuse, given its address in Fremont, one of the holy sites of native culture, where the Ohlone tribe roamed happily before the arrival of conquering European colonists. But INCC members' fanaticism about cricket clears up the picture. Named in sympathy with its associated political party in New Delhi, the INCC is more likely to be constituted by Gujaratis than Sioux, Apache, Hopi or Navajo.

The presence of the INCC in Fremont completes a neat historical quirk, one explained by the crowds who pack downtown Fremont's Naz Cinema for the nightly travails of Amitabh Bachchan, Manisha Koirala and Anil Kapoor, who, for $US9.95 can get a tape of the Bollywood schlocker they've just seen.

Thanks to the emergence of Silicon Valley on its doorstep, Fremont has gone from Ohlone Indian to sub-continental Indian in a few generations. Some parts of Fremont look more like a prosperous suburb of Bombay than of the San Francisco Bay area.

For the US, it's a case of India giving it its poor, its huddled masses, its cricket champions and its computer gurus.

Fremont gives the lie to the popular impression that Silicon Valley is a solely American phenomenon.

Silicon Valley is erstwhile home and workplace to more than 100,000 Indian, Chinese, African and Latino programmers and engineers working at the middle-to-upper levels of tech firms. But unlike previous generations of immigrants into the US melting pot, the new arrivals are not all committed to staying.

The Valley provides a venue for their skills, the US an immediate market for their start-up entrepreneurship and, in many cases, the engineers return home, sometimes with a US passport, to open the Bangalore or Penang operation of an Intel or a Cisco Systems or one of their own companies.

Some of the Valley's biggest companies - Intel, Sun, Oracle among them -were founded, or part-founded, by foreign-born entrepreneurs. The giant 3Com group, which makes some of the world's fastest modems, is run and partly-owned by the Algerian-born Eric Benhamou. One of the Valley's gods, Intel's Andrew S Grove, is better known as Anders Graf to relatives in his native Hungary.

Beyond these heavyweights there are people like Atiq Raza, Pakistan-born founder of microprocessor group NexGen, which was sold to Advanced Micro Devices for $US620 million last year.

And Filipino Dado Banatao, who founded S3 Chips & Technologies. And Shanghainese Cyrus Tsui, the man behind the $US700 million chip maker Lattice Semiconductor. And Israeli Dan Avida of the $US2 billion Electronics for Imaging, which makes computer servers for colour printing.

At Cypress Semiconductor in San Jose, pins on a map mark the birthplaces of staffers in its research and development division - China, India, Malaysia, Mongolia among them.

The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that as many as one third of Silicon Valley professionals are foreign-born. In many ways, it's no different from industrialists a century earlier. Andrew Carnegie was Scottish, Eleuthre Irne du Pont French. A casual tour through the Intel headquarters in Sunnyvale reveal a surfeit of Pakistani names on the in-house bulletin boards.

"An international workforce is our lifeblood," Intel's president Craig Barrett told the AFR. "They give us the competitive edge here and in their home markets."

A recent study by investment bankers Hambrecht & Quist and the University of California revealed there were 1,500 Asian-owned companies in the Valley, with a market value of more than $25 billion.

Another study by the National Science Foundation showed that non-US citizens accounted for 42 per cent, some 30,000, of all engineering students in US colleges, the traditional recruiting ground for Valley firms.

To put that in perspective, first-generation immigrants comprise less than 10 per cent of the US population.