India Post News Service

NEW YORK: For the first time in its history, the United States faces the prospect of a reverse brain-drain owing to flawed immigration policies, according to a recent study conducted by a Duke University team headed by Vivek Wadhwa.

Besides Wadhwa who is Executive in Residence, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, the team of researchers constituted: Guillermina Jasso, Professor Department of Sociology, New York University; Ben Rissing, Research Scholar and Project Manager Pratt School of Engineering, Master Duke University; Gary Gereffi Director, Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness; Richard Freeman, Director, Labor Studies Program, National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University.

Commenting on the findings of his report titled ‘Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain’, Wadhwa says, "Because of our flawed immigration policies, we have set the stage for the departure of hundreds of thousands of highly skilled professionals – who we have trained in our technology, techniques and markets and made even more valuable. This is a lose-lose for the US."

"Our corporations lose key talent that is contributing to innovation and competitiveness, and we end up creating potential competitors," he adds.

Pointing out the contribution of foreign nationals to the US, especially Indians, Wadhwa says, "The yearly inflow of talent from the world to the US is worth billions of dollars. If you compute what it costs to educate a skilled professional from childhood to the time they gain a graduate or post-graduate degree and multiply this by the number of such workers that come to the US, you’ll come up with some startling numbers. It could be that India has provided more in intellectual-capital to the US just over the last decade than all of the financial aid the US has given to India over the last 60 years! So one may ask – who’s helping who, here."

This latest paper is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants’ contributions to the competitiveness of the US economy. Earlier research revealed a dramatic increase in the contributions of foreign nationals to US intellectual property over an eight-year period.

The current paper offers a more refined measure of this change and seeks to explain this increase with an analysis of the immigrant-visa backlog for skilled workers. The key finding from this research is that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the United States. This imbalance creates the potential for a sizeable reverse brain-drain from the US to the skilled workers’ home countries.

Wadhwa says that he was shocked to learn that there were over a million skilled immigrants in what he calls "immigration limbo". "I had previously heard numbers in the 200-300 range and thought these numbers were very high. I doubt that political leaders in the US are aware that there are so many skilled workers waiting in line – and that we may lose many of these.

This topic has received very little coverage because until now, there were no estimates available. The only estimates were of the numbers of illegal and unskilled workers." A big surprise, he says, was the huge contribution that foreign nationals were making in creating global patents for top American firms. The bigger surprise was that 41 percent of the US government’s global patents had foreign-nationals listed as inventors. Foreign-nationals contributed to 25.6 percent of all U.S. international patent applications in 2006, but the numbers were much higher in several states such as New Jersey (37 percent), California (36 percent) and Massachusetts (32 percent).

In conclusion, the report states that in the global economy, America’s greatest advantage is its ability to push the frontier of knowledge and its application. In contrast to current debates about trade, international capital flows, and illegal immigration, the study analyzes the role that highly educated immigrants to the United States make in creating knowledge and innovation, and highlights the problems these immigrants face in attaining permanent status and the country’s risk in losing some of them.

Specifically, the study finds that:

1. In 2006, foreign nationals residing in the US were inventors or co-inventors of one in four US PCT applications—a more than three-fold increase over their proportion in 1998.

2. More than half a million skilled immigrants are awaiting legal permanent residence, and more than a million are in this situation. The immigration backlog is not simply a visa processing problem—which government agencies are working to reduce—but a visa shortage problem: Only 120,000 or so visas are available annually for the million or so applicants.

3. In 2003, approximately one in five new legal immigrants in the US, and about one in three employment principals, either planned to leave the country or were uncertain about remaining. The authors of the report think that a number of these are discouraged by the visa backlog and thus constitute the possible "reverse brain-drain".

Putting the visa issue in perspective, Wadhwa says, "I am by no means advocating that we expand the numbers of H-1B visas. In fact, part of this problem has been created by our expanding the numbers of temporary workers we admit and not increasing the numbers of permanent resident visas. If the US needs skilled immigrants, we should bring them here to stay – not as temporary workers."

Wadhwa says that the focus of the immigration has been on the plight of the unskilled workers who have entered the country illegally. "We do need many of these workers and we need to develop a humane and fair solution to this problem. If we wait 5 years to reform the immigration system, the illegal and unskilled will still be here – these poor people have few options. But the highly educated and skilled – who are fueling economic growth and contributing significantly to US global competitiveness will be long gone. They are in even more demand in countries like India and China than they are in the US. Our loss will be the gain of their home countries."

The US benefits from having foreign-born innovators create their ideas in the country. Their departures would, thus, be detrimental to US economic well-being. And, when foreigners come to the US, collaborate with Americans in developing and patenting new ideas, and employ those ideas in business in ways they could not readily do in their home countries, the world benefits. Therefore, foreign national departures from the United States also reduce global well-being, the report states.

Given that the US comparative advantage in the global economy is in creating knowledge and applying it to business, it behooves the country to consider how it might adjust policies to reduce the immigration backlog, encourage innovative foreign minds to remain in the country, and entice new innovators to come, the report concludes.