Vivek Wadhwa is concerned about a “reverse brain-drain” – foreign nationals taking their degrees in the US and then going home. According to Wadhwa, that’s bad:
When smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the seeds of tomorrow's innovation. Almost 25 percent of all international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006 named foreign nationals as inventors. Immigrants founded a quarter of all U.S. engineering and technology companies started between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. In 2005 alone, immigrants' businesses generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
Why is that bad? In the past, the US has taken the best and brightest from third-world countries, educated them, and kept them in the US, depriving those countries of the very people most likely to move those countries to first-world status.
Why is it bad to deny the third world the opportunity to move up to first world status? According to Wadwha,
[A]lthough immigrants accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, they made up 47 percent of all scientists and engineers with doctorates. What's more, 67 percent of all those who entered the fields of science and engineering between 1995 and 2006 were immigrants.
What will happen to America's competitive edge when these people go home?
Well, for starters, perhaps it will spur the US to take a long, critical look at our incredibly lousy feelings-based elementary and secondary school systems and fix them. It wouldn’t hurt to do the same at the university level as well.
