During the closing decades of the 20th century, roughly 80% of the Chinese and Indians who earned U.S. Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have stayed in the United States and provided a critical boost to the nation’s economy. Perversely, now that China and India are becoming formidable economic competitors, the United States seems inclined to enhance their economic productivity by supplying them with an army of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers. These returnees are spurring a technology boom in their home countries, expanding their capacity to provide outsourcing services for U.S. companies, and adding increasingly sophisticated primary R&D capability in knowledge industries such as aerospace, medical devices, pharmaceutical research, and software design.
One obvious sign of U.S. complacency about these developments is the absence of data to confirm the anecdotal evidence. In spite of all the controversy surrounding immigration policy, the government has not bothered to determine how much immigrants contribute to the economy or to assess the likelihood and consequences of a major shift in their desire to work in the United States in the future. To fill this gap, the Global Engineering and Entrepreneurship project at Duke University has attempted to quantify the role of immigrants in founding entrepreneurial companies and developing new technologies, to understand how federal policies affect decisions about working in the United States, and to assess the competing opportunities in India and China and the other factors that influence life decisions.
With financial support from the Kauffman Foundation, a research team including Gary Gereffi of Duke University, AnnaLee Saxenian of University of California at Berkeley, Richard Freeman of Harvard University, Ben Rissing of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Guillermina Jasso of New York University spent three years conducting multiple surveys of thousands of technology and engineering startup companies, interviewed hundreds of company founders, surveyed more than 1,000 foreign students and more than 1,000 returnees, and made several trips to India and China to understand the on-the-ground realities in those countries.
U.S. immigration policy has been made in an information void. Although our research is far from conclusive, we believe it is fair to say that current immigration policy significantly undervalues the contributions these skilled immigrants make to high-growth segments of the U.S. economy. It appears that immigrants spur innovation in the United States and even help foment innovation by non-immigrants. At present, U.S. technological preeminence is not in question. Furthermore, some degree of intellectual dispersion and circulation is inevitable and valuable to the global economy. The United States cannot expect to maintain its previously overwhelming technological superiority in an increasingly globalized economy. But it takes a rare blend of short-sightedness and hubris to fail to investigate trends in the movement of global talent or to reconsider immigration policies that are not only economically counterproductive but also potentially damaging to U.S. national security.
That's from the excellent essay by Vivek Wadwha in ISSUES.
Comments