West 'Hemorrhaging' Its Best Brains, Study Claims (2009)

Highly educated immigrants are increasingly likely to return home after taking advanced degrees in the United States, leaving the country that trained them facing potential skills shortages and increased competition, according to a study from an American foundation. A combination of changing perceptions about where opportunity lies, rising nationalist sentiment in the face of a global recession, and poorly thought-out immigration policies, is said to have caused the shift in sentiment and behavior. A similar pattern appears to be emerging in other parts of the developed world. Immigrants have long driven America's high-technology sector, helping create companies such as eBay, Google, Intel, and Yahoo, and have contributed to more than a quarter of U.S. global patent applications. Foreign students received nearly 60% of all engineering doctorates and more than half of all mathematics, computer sciences, physics, and economics doctorates awarded in the U.S. in 2005. Study Paints Bleak Picture study, Losing the World's Best and Brightest: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part V, was sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to entrepreneurship (1). In October 2008, its authors used Facebook, the social networking website, to poll 1,224 foreign nationals who were either studying in U.S. institutions of higher learning, or recent graduates. They found that only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students and 25% of Indian students thought the best days for the American economy lay ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students felt the best days for their country's economies lay ahead. There were other troubling results. Only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese and 15% of Europeans intended to settle permanently in the United States. number of graduates who wanted to stay in the U.S. for a few years also fell, with only 58% of Indian, 54% of Chinese and 40% of European students wanting to stay on. Earlier National Science Foundation research showed that 92% of Chinese students and 85% for Indian students stayed for five years or more. students polled were also an entrepreneurial group; 64% of Indian, 66% of European and 68% of Chinese students said they wanted to start a business in the next decade, with most of the Indian and Chinese students hoping to do so in their home [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Among the reasons given for leaving the U.S. were better economic opportunities at home, a desire to be with friends and family, and concerns about job prospects and the availability of visas. New Phenomenon? Max Zedtwitz, a vice president at PRTM Management Consultants and professor at Peking University, who studies the globalization of R&D, said that similar sentiments emerged during the economic shock at the beginning of the decade. The same happened during 2000/2001, and back then it was mostly motivated by the collapse of the 'new economy', Zedtwitz said. This time, we have a combination of a remarkably poor overall economy, the remainders of a set of policies that make it difficult for foreigners to stay in the U.S., and local economies in India and China that are doing better compared to their 2000/2001 predecessors. Zedtwitz believes the same is happening with foreign students studying in Europe: My view is that we also see a fair amount of returnees from Europe, attracted back to China and India due to the opportunities in their home countries. Sarah Box, an economist in the science and technology policy division of the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), worked on its 2008 publication, Global Competition for Talent: Mobility of the Highly Skilled (2). She suspects that the timing of the Kauffman survey, just after the scope of the global economic crisis became apparent, will have strongly influenced its findings. …