A Reverse Brain Drain

Until now A New Approach has focused more on the humanitarian aspect of immigration reform, and it will continue to do so in the future because I feel that it is the most urgent reason for reform.

However, it is certainly not the only reason for a new immigration policy. There are enormous economic benefits as well. One of the benefits would be a decrease in the "reverse brain drain" phenomenon that the United States is currently experiencing for the first time in its history.

A brain drain is the loss of skilled and technical workers to another country. This usually benefits global powers like the United States and Britain to the detriment of developing countries like India and South Africa. Many of the most talented doctors, engineers and scientists leave their homelands for better opportunities in more prosperous countries.

In a BusinessWeek article, Vivek Wadhwa wrote that research by his team at Duke University showed that more than 1 million highly skilled professionals and their families were applying for only 120,000 permanent-resident visas in 2007.

Wadwha wrote "These individuals entered the country legally to study or to work. They contributed to U.S. economic growth and global competitiveness. Now we've set the stage for them to return to countries such as India and China, where the economies are booming and their skills are in great demand. U.S. businesses large and small stand to lose critical talent, and workers who have gained valuable experience and knowledge of American industry may become potential competitors."

He says the problem is simple, that there aren't enough permanent visas available for the amount of skilled professionals that want to work in this country. And because the number of visas that can be issued to workers from any single country is capped at 10,000, "countries with the largest populations such as India and China are allocated the same number of visas as Iceland and Mongolia."

Now you might be saying, "so what?" These people are highly educated and should be able to find work wherever they go. Well the benefits of such workers, and losses when they leave, are enormous.

Wadwha cites an estimate by Richard Devon of Pennsylvania State University of $200,000 as the amount invested in someone who has earned a bachelor's degree in engineering. That means the United States gains billions of dollars when educated professionals leave their countries to live in the U.S., and loses that money when they return home.

On top of that, more than half of the technology companies started in Silicon Valley from 1995 to 2006 were founded by immigrants. These companies have 450,000 employees and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006. A related article by John Tozzi further describes the importance of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Wadwha's research also found that one quarter of patent applications in 2006 listed a foreign national living in the U.S. as the inventor. These inventors were not the entrepreneurs, but rather PhD students and employees of U.S. corporations on temporary visas.

Their research into patents found that:

• Foreign nationals contributed to more than half of the international patents filed by companies such as Qualcomm (QCOM) (72%), Merck (MRK) (65%), General Electric (GE) (64%), Siemens (SI) (63%), and Cisco (CSCO) (60%). Their contributions were relatively small at Microsoft (MSFT) (3%) and General Motors (GM) (6%). Surprisingly, 41% of the patents filed by the U.S. government had foreign nationals listed as inventors.

• Foreign nationals contributed to 25.6% of all U.S. international patent applications in 2006, but the numbers were much higher in several states such as New Jersey (37%), California (36%), and Massachusetts (32%).

• In 2006, 16.8% of international patent applications from the U.S. had inventors with Chinese names and 36% of these (or 5.5% of the total) were foreign nationals. Similarly, 13.7% had Indian names and 40% (or 6.2% of the total) were foreign nationals.

• Both Indian and Chinese inventors tended to file most patents in the fields of medicine, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and electronics.

Wadwha also found that as of 2006 there were 1,181,505 educated and skilled professionals waiting to gain legal permanent-resident status. Those professionals, along with many of the 259,717 international students and 38,096 foreigners in practical training, want to live and work in the United States. Most will have to wait from between four to six years for visas, and during this time they could become disenfranchised with the process and decide to go home or to another country that grants easier access, like Canada.

In a 2003 survey, one in three professionals who had been through the immigration process were uncertain about staying in the U.S.

As a country we are in the enviable position of having skilled professionals wanting to come here to work, invent, and start businesses. We absolutely need to make sure that those who apply are granted visas quickly before they go somewhere else. There is no debate like with the immigration of unskilled workers, these are some of the best and brightest workers in the world and we are turning away hundreds of thousands because of an antiquated immigration system. These changes need to be made yesterday, and certainly need to be made before we lose anymore people to our competitors in the global market or even worse, before they stop wanting to come here at all.

The Illegal Immigration Problem Solved in Five Minutes!

The following video, despite its simple presentation, is a very smart, informative and dryly humorous look at the immigration debate in the United States. It is pretty long, around 15 minutes, but worth watching in its entirety.



The video does a good job illustrating the hypocrisy of immigrants scapegoating more recent immigrants for societal problems and also describes the immigration "debate" as one driven by xenophobia.

Daisy, the older cat, claims the powerful class uses two strategies to mobilize support for their interests.
1) They capitalize on people's fears and insecurities.
2) They unify people against a common enemy, the more defenseless the enemy the better.

Obviously this video is an oversimplification of the issues and and very biased towards one side of the debate, however that does not mean the information is not accurate or the message isn't valid. It also looks at the debate in a different way, and one line in particular stood out to me.

"We act like the laws that sort immigrants into legal or illegal types dropped out of the sky, directly from God. Of course not, laws are made and enforced by the dominant group in a society, generally to benefit themselves."

"You can attack people by making them illegal, you demonize them, you attribute every social ill you can think of to their presence."

It is true that we make the laws, so by changing the laws we can change the problem. I think that, at its essence, this is what immigration reform is all about. It is not about opening the floodgates to everybody and sacrificing security, as opponents sometimes imply, it is about understanding that the current problem is too convoluted to be solved, so going at it in a different way is a better option than maintaining the status quo.

NAFTA and Immigration Reform

Border issues and human migration are very important to Sarah Roberts. The Tucson, Ariz. nurse has been involved with the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths since its creation in 2004 and with Humane Borders before that. She also works with the Guatemala Project to help displaced families in Central America.

She has seen first-hand the desperation and suffering caused by the current immigration policy in the United States, particularly with Mexico.

"There is a planned policy of deterrence that means people will die in the desert, and the government is aware of that," she said. "The deterrent strategy of the government is to make it as uncomfortable as possible for people to try and come here to work, so ultimately that means that some people are going to die."

She said she would like to see not only comprehensive immigration reform but also the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

"I think those [NAFTA and CAFTA] are what really drive people out of their homes. With these free trade agreements economies are flooded with cheap produce and cheap goods from other places, which forces people out because they aren't able to make a living," Roberts said.

This exacerbates the already overburdened immigration system in the United States. Adding Guatemalans and Salvadorans the the queue in Mexico makes legal migration an even more difficult route. This forces people to cross illegally, usually through the desert as Roberts said, a dangerous journey that claims many lives.

In the introduction to Revisiting NAFTA: Still not working for North America's workers, Jeff Faux writes that 14 years after NAFTA was implemented, " it is clear that the costs to workers outweighed the benefits in all three nations."

Overall, "In each nation, workers' share of the gains from rising productivity fell and the proportion of income and wealth going to those at the very top of the economic pyramid grew," according to Faux.

Specifically in Mexico, "Mexican employment did increase, but much of it in low-wage "maquiladora" industries, which the promoters of NAFTA promised would disappear. The agricultural sector was devastated and the share of jobs with no security, no benefits, and no future expanded. The continued willingness every year of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens to risk their lives crossing the border to the United States because they cannot make a living at home is in itself testimony to the failure of NAFTA to deliver on the promises of its promoters."