At Sun Microsystems' event on emerging countries yesterday, Qualcomm's CIO did not shy away from criticising the current US immigration policy, that makes it hard to hire and keep foreign nationals.

"It seems crazy to me that we allow people to come here, train them and let them return back to their country. So what are they going to do? They're going to set up competition", said Norm Fjeldheim, Qualcomm's senior vice-president & CIO.

The situation is getting even worse as Qualcomm is having a hard time finding enough talents in the US and is now forced to shop and set-up operations elsewhere, notably in India and Europe.

"We're going where the talent is [...] Most of our acquisitions have been talent based [...] India has been our starting point but we're going all over Europe. Not much in China yet [...] We have an innovation factory and we need the talents to run it", Fjeldheim added.

Fjeldheim also said that Qualcomm is investing in IT outsourcing operations in Hyderabad, India, instead of Bangalore, where costs are rising and attrition is high. Surprisingly, costs were not the primary factor for this move... workforce stability was

"In Hyderabad, the workforce is more stable. And I have a ressource pool that i can count on", said the Qualcomm executive.