Theories of high-skilled migration have only recently entered the academic discourse. Those that do exist interact with more sophisticated theories of manual labor migration in only partial ways, and tend to frame of professional workers from periphery to core nations primarily in terms of their developmental effects on the source country. In this paper I argue that the "brain drain" or "brain gain" debate erroneously portrays high-skilled migration as a homogenous theoretical concept that lacks sufficient consideration of the migratory process itself. Using data from interviews and a case study of the University of Northern New Jersey, a sting operation by the Department of Homeland Security targeting foreign students allegedly using so-called “visa mills” to game the U.S. guest worker system, I examine the role of path dependence and network evolution in high-skilled Indian migration to the United States. While the migrant literature associates the modal elite professional immigrant from South Asia with personal initiative, open networks and high degrees of integration, I show that more recent waves of high-skilled migration have been characterized by closed networks, recent mobility, ethnic enclaves and more limited degrees of professional success in the receiving economy. Recent high-skilled migrants also face higher degrees of legal risk due to the increasing prevalence of functional substitutes to legal work visas. I consider changes in U.S. visa policy, Indian developmental strategies, global economic dynamics and the effects of cumulative causation as plausible explanations for this divergence. The paper concludes by arguing that the bimodal nature of high-skilled migration to the United States has far-reaching developmental and migration policy consequences that are overlooked by the current literature.