New Delhi: Countries that fail to attract immigrants risk losing out as the global technology industry continues to grow, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said in an interview to Bloomberg, days after he criticised the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
“Every country is rethinking what is in their national interest” but governments should “maintain that modicum of enlightenment and not think about it very narrowly”, Nadella said in an interview to Bloomberg on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos.
“People will only come when people know you’re an immigrant-friendly country,” he added.
However, Nadella went on to add that he continues to be an “India optimist” owing to its “70-year history of nation-building”.
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‘An immigrant’s unicorn’
The Indian-origin tech titan’s fresh comments come just a week after he criticised the controversial CAA in another interview, saying he “would love to see a Bangladeshi immigrant who comes to India and creates the next unicorn in India or becomes the next CEO of Infosys”.
“Every country will and should define its borders, protect national security and set immigration policy accordingly. And in democracies, that is something that the people and their governments will debate and define within those bounds,” he said during an interaction with editors at a Microsoft event in the US.
“I’m shaped by my Indian heritage, growing up in a multicultural India and my immigrant experience in the United States. My hope is for an India where an immigrant can aspire to found a prosperous start-up or lead a multinational corporation benefitting Indian society and the economy at large,” he added.
Notified in January, the CAA seeks to ease the path to Indian citizenship for six non-Muslim minorities from Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The law has been widely criticised as biased for its bid to introduce a religious grounds for Indian citizenship.
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