Monday, February 16, 2009

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.

1 comment:

  1. Cameron, this is an excellent and thoughtful post. Wish you lots of success in your journalism career.

    ReplyDelete