The Pain of the Reverse Brain Drain
Waiting is tough duty, especially for the young, talented and ambitious. It can feel like a waste of time and life, so it's only natural that such people start looking elsewhere for opportunities, ones that don't require the same kind of waiting game.
This is, in a nutshell, the danger that the U.S. faces in regard to a large portion of its immigrant talent base, argues a new study from the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation. It reports that over a million skilled immigrants and their family members vie for just 120,000 permanent U.S. resident visas – also known as green cards – each year. Many of these professionals might give up and move elsewhere – such as to their home countries – thereby depriving the U.S. and its employers of their skills and energy ("Kauffman," 2007).
"It's the first time in American history that we are faced with the prospect of a reverse brain drain," noted Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard Law School and co-author of the study Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog and a Reverse Brain Drain. It might, in fact, already be more than just a prospect. About 100,000 skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants returned home from the U.S. over the last three to five years, according to Wadhwa (Bora, 2007).
Some anecdotal evidence suggests that large numbers of skilled immigrants are no longer bothering to come to the U.S. in the first place. Rosen Sharma, an Indian immigrant and U.S. entrepreneur, arrived in the U.S. in 1993 after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He wasn't alone. Fully 37 or 40 members of his graduating class did likewise.
But times have changed, notes Sharma, now president of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association. In 2006, of the IIT graduates who received the same kind of degree as Sharma, just 10 out of 45 decided to try for U.S. jobs (Corcoran, 2007). As economic opportunities grow in India and elsewhere, the question is why foreign talent should bother dealing with U.S. visa hassles.
Some experts argue that the U.S. is not doing enough to address those concerns. Not only is it difficult to get a green card in the U.S., it's hard to get an H-1B visa, which is often the first step to a green card for skilled workers. There was a 65,000 limit on H-1B specialized-occupation temporary worker visas for fiscal year 2008, and that limit was exhausted April 2, 2007, the first day the visas were available, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency received a record-setting flood of about 150,000 applications by the afternoon of the first day they could be submitted (Perelman, 2007).
Even if they do get an H-1B visa, such employees are somewhat restricted in their opportunities. They can't take new jobs with other employers, for example, and they can't start up their own businesses, as they can once they have a green card.
A number of experts see such legal constraints as barriers to opportunity, ones that have a ripple effect across the entire U.S. economy, reducing innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation. The Kauffman study notes, for example, that foreign nationals who live in the U.S. were the inventors or co-inventors of 26% of the international patents filed in the U.S., up from just 8% in 1998. Other research has found that the U.S. acquires 62 future patent applications for every 100 international students who receive a Ph.D. in science or engineering from a U.S. university (Anderson, 2006).
Researchers have also found that foreign nationals are often successful business owners, thereby creating jobs in the marketplace. In fact, immigrants founded about a quarter of engineering and technology startups between 1995 and 2005. Last year, 450,000 people worked for companies started by immigrants, and those firms produced $52 billion in revenues for the U.S. economy ("Kauffman," 2007).
There are, of course, those who argue that bottlenecks in the immigration system for skilled workers are not a national problem. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – which states that it is motivated by a "pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision" – recently released a study concluding that businesses tend to use the H-1B visa programs to hire relatively low-wage workers. "Employers in the technology field are using these visas because they can get away with paying less and bypassing American workers," argues CIS policy analyst Jessica Vaughan (Bora, 2007).
Others take issue with such findings, arguing that, by law, employers must pay the prevailing wage within professions. And research conducted by Paul E. Harrington of Northeastern University indicates that foreign-born and U.S.-born professionals in the math and science fields earn about the same salaries (Anderson, 2006).
The debate and accumulation of research on this issue are bound to continue. Many employers will lobby in favor of higher H-1B caps and shorter green card waits. Other groups will argue that caps need to be maintained to protect U.S. jobs, secure higher domestic wages, or serve national security interests.
But both groups must bear in mind that the global landscape is shifting beneath this long-standing debate. The U.S. is not the only "land of opportunity" in the world today, and Americans can no longer assume that it will continue to attract the best and brightest to its universities and businesses. In fact, some observers even project that the flood of talent could start to flow outward from the U.S. as both foreign-born and native-born U.S. skilled workers increasingly seek opportunities overseas.
For more information:
For much more on immigration issues, see the institute's Immigration Patterns Knowledge Center. Also see the Skill Level of the Workforce Knowledge Center.
For more on the Kauffman report, please click here.
Documents referenced in this TrendWatcher include the following:
Anderson, Stuart. "The Debate Over Quotas on Highly Skilled Legal Immigrants." International Educator. ProQuest. November/December 2006.
Bora, Madhusmita. "Stringent Visa Regulations Are Hurting Companies, Universities." Knight Ridder Business News. ProQuest. May 20, 2007.
Bora, Madhusmita. "U.S. Faces Decline in Skilled Workers." St. Petersburg Times, August 23, 2007, pp. 1D, 6D.
Constable, Pamela. "Worker Visas Intensify Debate on Immigration." Wasingtonpost.com. ProQuest. May 25, 2007.
Corcoran, Elizabeth. "Silicon Valley's Immigration Problem." Forbes.com. March 15, 2007.
"Kauffman Foundation Study Points to 'Brain-Drain' of Skilled U.S. Immigrant Entrepreneurs to Home Country." Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. August 22, 2007.
Perelman, Deborah. "Year's Supply of H-1B Visas Tapped Out on Day One." eWeek.com. April 4, 2007.