Ok, then tell me why they haven't done that already. They could save huge amounts of money by just laying off everyone in the US and hiring new people in India (or relocating everyone to India). The salaries in India are easily 1/5 or less than those in Silicon Valley.

So what's stopping them?

> So what's stopping them?

The highly skilled American employees in their US-workforce?

According to other people, there's plenty of highly-skilled people in India. And they cost 1/5 as much. So why bother with the Americans?

Probably because they need the highly-skilled people both in India and US - to put together fruitful collaborations like these [1] (which, incidentally, created a sub-field which employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, Americans included).

At the moment, it might be more economically sensible to convince the Indian to move to US than to convince the American to move to India. But if you make it too hard or impossible to do that, Google will re-evaluate options at their disposal and decide accordingly.

[1]: https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html

If they "need" the highly-skilled people in the US, who cost 5-6x the ones in India, then there's something clearly lacking with the people in India. Otherwise, why not just dump the US workers altogether and move all new operations to India? They can even move their American workers there and offer them a salary that's 1.5x-2x the standard salary in India and still save a bundle over Silicon Valley salary levels.

Seriously: these companies keep threatening this, I wish they'd just do it and see how it works out for them. It just sounds like an idle threat to me to try to get their way in the US. I'm really sick and tired of their threats.