Brain Drain: Diplomas are not enough, add Green Cards please!

Combining the diploma with a green card would help maintain America's position as a leading global force in economic development and innovation, suggests Gupta in “Forbes” magazine.

His arguments sound convincing. In the 21st century, the top competitors will possess an abundance of human capital. Winners will need people with the knowledge, the training and the ideas to produce the most profitable inventions. And so far knowledge is the domain of America’s great universities. In Jiao Tong University of Shanghai's annual ranking of the world's universities, the U.S. routinely dominates. Seventeen of the top 20 universities in the most recent ranking are American. (None of the top 100 schools in this Chinese survey is in China.)

Often their alumni end up building careers in the U.S. The National Venture Capital Association for example found in 2006 that immigrants played a major role in creating 25 per cent of all venture-backed public firms in the U.S. during the previous 15 years, and that 40 per cent of the venture-backed companies operating in high-technology manufacturing were started by immigrants.
Increasingly, however, foreign-born students are taking their American diplomas back to their native countries. A team of academic researchers working on a multipart study “America's Loss is the World's Gain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” has sounded the alarm about what they call the “reverse brain drain” that threatens the U.S. They wrote that “a substantial number of highly skilled immigrants have started returning to their home countries, including persons from low-income countries like India and China, who have historically tended to stay permanently in the U.S. These returnees contributed to the tech boom in those countries and arguably spurred the growth of outsourcing of back-office processes as well as of research and development.”

A global competition for Ph.Ds

The study noted the contributions of immigrants to the growth of the high-tech sector in the U.S., who helped to create world-changing companies such as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo. “But the frustration of waiting for permanent resident visas and the increase in opportunities in their native countries has led more U.S.-educated immigrants to buy one-way plane tickets back home. And once they return they find good pay and speedy advancement, along with other professional and personal benefits,” explains Gupta.

Meanwhile the nations of Asia have been producing Ph.Ds in engineering at astronomical rates. The number of new engineering Ph.Ds in the U.S. increased 89 per cent between 1983 and 2003, and most of these were foreign-born students. In Japan during the same period, the increase was 204 per cent; in South Korea, 1858 per cent and in Taiwan 4586 per cent. During a recent eight-year period in China, the number of engineering students climbed 306 per cent. “All the more reason for the U.S. to hold on to the smart young people it educates, whether they come to our universities from Chicago or Chennai.”

This trend of foreign-born students leaving the U.S. will likely persist to one degree or another, especially as economic expansion continues in Asia, predicts Gupta. “But why should we help it along with an immigration policy that puts into peril our standing as the world's innovation leader?”

www.forbes.com