The American Dream is Huge in Asia

The young and ambitious from Eastern Europe to the Far East are all still chasing the American idyll of fast cars, fancy clothes and glamorous jobs—but now they’re finding it by returning home.

Illustrations by Run Ayunyang

After moving back to India from Massachusetts in June, Namita Chaudhary walked into a Mumbai mall—one that didn’t exist when she and her husband left in 2008—to discover all of her favorite American brands, even the Clarks walking shoes she used to buy at malls in Boston.

It wasn’t the only modernization to her home country that surprised the thirty-seven-year-old, who returned to raise her children in her own culture, and for career opportunities for her husband. Many of Chaudhary’s Indian friends now owned two homes, multiple cars with drivers, and vacationed in Italy, Hawaii and Australia. They had begun to earn comparable, if not higher, salaries than those of software engineers in the United States.

“India,” she says, “is booming.”

Chaudhary and her husband were among the 1.9 million people of Indian birth living in the United States in 2011. But now the Chaudharys are part of a new, growing demographic of reverse immigrants leaving the developed world t…