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His former employer continues to sponsor his application for permanent residency, hoping that he will eventually return. But Chandrand doesn't know what the future will hold.

"I miss Raleigh, the weather, the people," he said in a phone interview. "But it's a very difficult decision to make, once you've settled in a country, to move out. You go through a lot of mental strain. Making another move will be difficult."

Canada won him over because its residency process takes only a year and a half and doesn't require sponsorship from an employer.

The competition from Canada also worries Plueddeman, who said several of his employees are also applying for residency in both countries. "They'll go with whoever comes first," he said.

And it's not just India and Canada that beckon. New Zealand and Australia are among nations that actively market themselves to professionals in the United States, with perks such as an easy process to get work visas.

New Zealand, with a population of 4 million, has received more than 1,900 applications from skilled migrants and their families in the past two years, said Don Badman, the Los Angeles marketing director for that country's immigration agency. Of those, about 17 percent were non-Americans working in the United States.

Badman's team has hired a public relations agency to get the word out. They have also run ads in West Coast newspapers and attended trade shows, mainly to attract professionals in health care and information technology.

Dana Hutchison, an operating room nurse from Cedar Mountain south of Asheville, could have joined a hospital in the United States that offers fat sign-on bonuses. Instead, she's in the small town of Tauranga, east of Auckland, working alongside New Zealand nurses and doctors.

"It would be hard for me to work in the U.S. again," she said. Where she is now, "the working conditions are so fabulous. Everybody is friendly and much less stressed. It's like the U.S. was in the 1960s."

Limit of 140,000

Getting a green card was never a quick process. The official limit for employment-based green cards is 140,000 annually.

And there is a bottleneck of technology professionals from India and China. They hold many, if not most, of all temporary work visas, and many try to convert their work visa to permanent residency, and eventually full citizenship. But under current rules, no single nationality can be allotted more than 7 percent of the green cards.

In his February economic report, President Bush outlined proposals to overhaul the system for employment-based green cards:

* Open more slots by exempting spouses and children from the annual limit of 140,000 green cards. Such dependents now make up about half of all green card recipients, because workers sponsored by employers can include their family in the application.

* Replace the current cap with a "flexible market-based cap" that responds to the need that employers have for foreign workers.

* Raise the 7 percent limit for nations such as India that have many highly skilled workers.

After steady lobbying from technology companies, Congress is also paying more attention to the issue. The Senate immigration bill had proposed raising the annual cap for green cards to 290,000.

Kumar Gupta, a 33-year-old software engineer, has been watching the legislative proposals as he weighs his options. After six years in the United States, he is considering returning to India after learning that the green card he applied for in November 2004 could take another four or five years.

Being on a temporary work visa means that he cannot leave his job. Nor does he want to buy a home for his family without knowing he will stay in the country.

"Even if the job market is not as good as here, you can get a very good salary in India," he said. "If I have offers there, I will think of moving."

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