With anti-immigrant sentiment building across the nation, and clouds of nativism swirling around Washington, D.C., skilled immigrants are voting with their feet. They are returning home to countries like India and China. It’s not just the people we are denying visas to who are leaving; even U.S. permanent residents and naturalized citizens are going to where they think the grass is greener. As a result, India and China are experiencing an entrepreneurship boom. And they are learning to innovate just as Silicon Valley does.
Some call this a "brain drain" others say it is "brain circulation." It is without doubt, good for these countries and it is good for the world. But this is America's loss: innovation that would otherwise be happening here is going abroad. Without realizing it, we are exporting our prosperity and strengthening our competitors.
There are no hard data available on how many skilled immigrants have already left the U.S. My estimate is that 150,000 have returned to India and China, each, over the past two decades. The trend has accelerated dramatically over the past five years; tens of thousands are now returning home every year. Most authorities agree with these estimates. For example, the Chinese Ministry of Education estimates that the number of overseas Chinese who returned to China in 2009 having received a foreign education reached 108,000: a sharp increase of 56.2% over the previous year. In 2010, this number reached an all-time high of 134,800 (a significant proportion studied in the U.S.).
Why is this important? Because, as research conducted by my team at Duke, UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and New York University has shown, 52.4% of all startups in Silicon Valley, from 1995 to 2005, were founded by immigrants. With all these immigrants leaving, and the next generation of foreign-born entrepreneurs trapped in "immigration limbo," we won't have as many immigrant founded startups in the future. The xenophobes who are lobbying against skilled immigration will cheer; but there won't be more jobs for Americans; just less startups in the U.S. and more abroad. The U.S. pie will be smaller.
My team researched the backgrounds of immigrant founders, and the U.S. immigration backlog. We learned that the majority came to the U.S. as students; 74% held graduate or post graduate degrees, of which 75% were in science, engineering, technology, or mathematics. On average, immigrants started their ventures 13 years after entering the U.S.
During the last twenty years, we admitted record numbers of international students and highly educated foreign workers on temporary visas. But we never expanded the number of permanent resident visas that allow them to stay permanently. The result is that we have a backlog of more than one million skilled workers"”doctors, scientists, researchers, and engineers, who are trapped in immigration limbo. They are working for the same companies and doing the same jobs as when they filed their paperwork for gaining permanent residence; this may have been 10-15 years ago. A foreign student who graduates with a masters or PhD in engineering from Duke or Stanford and joins the queue today will have to wait 10-20 years, perhaps longer, to gain permanent residence. They can't start companies or progress their careers during the most productive period in their lives. Why would anyone put up with that?
Indeed, a survey we conducted of 1,224 foreign nationals who were studying at U.S. universities in 2009, or who had just graduated, revealed that they believed that the U.S. was no longer the destination of choice for professional careers. Most did not want to stay for very long. Fifty eight percent of Indian, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of European students said that they would stay in the U.S. for at least a few years after graduation if given the chance, but only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese, and 15% of European students said they want to stay permanently. The largest group of respondents"” 55% of Indian, 40% of Chinese, and 30% of European students"”wanted to return home within five years. This is very different than what used to be the norm in previous decades: the vast majority of Indians and Chinese stayed permanently.
Our surveys, in 2008, of 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked in or received their education in the U.S. and returned to their home countries revealed that although restrictive immigration policies had caused some returnees to depart, the most significant factors in the decision to return home were career opportunities, family ties, and quality of life. The move home also served as a career catalyst. For example, only 10% of the Indian returnees held senior management positions in the U.S., but 44% found jobs at this level in India. Chinese returnees went from 9% in senior management in the U.S. to 36% in China. The vast majority thought that quality of life, professional advancement, and family ties were at least as good at home as in the U.S.
The majority of the people we surveyed said they planned to start a business within five years. When we published our research, many experts said that this is where returnees would face the greatest frustration"”that the weak infrastructure in India; authoritarianism in China; and corruption and red tape and lack of funding in both countries would be a severe handicap. In other words, when it came to competition from startups in India and China, the U.S. had nothing to worry about.
So, last September, we initiated a project to learn how the entrepreneurship landscape in India and China compares to the U.S. We wanted to learn why these entrepreneurs returned, what their perceptions of the entrepreneurial climate in their home countries were, what the advantages and disadvantages of working in India and China were over working in the U.S., and what types of ties they maintained to the U.S.
We were really surprised at what we learned. In the next installment, I'll discuss our findings.
Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and senior research associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.
[Image via spierzchala/Flickr]
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Tony Yarusso It's not just immigration policy either, nor only immigrants that are affected. I'm a natural-born US citizen in my 20s, about to finish my second post-secondary degree (in the IT sector), and I'm considering leaving the country after that. It's a simple economic consideration - health care is obscenely expensive and inefficient in the US, there's little emphasis on innovation left in the economy, and the increasingly polarized cultural and political environment makes it an uncomfortable place to live. Meanwhile, the bordering country of Canada has affordable, accessible, universal health care coverage, a stable economy that survived the recent recession due to sensible regulation, and a relatively rational and respectful culture. If things don't turn around here soon it will be a no-brainer. DelawareBob "With anti-immigrant sentiment..."I didn't know that American people were anti-immigrant. This is terriable! I for one am against illegal aliens as they have NO RIGHT to be in this country. Some people call them immigrants, but they are wrong. They are ILLEGAL ALIENS.Illegal aliens are destroying this Country, and one would have to be almost blind not to see this. How much longer do we have to support these illegal aliens? How much longer do we have to school their illegal alien children? How much longer are we going to let them have our jobs? How much longer are we going to put up with all the crime, stolen identities, forged documents, fake green cards? How much longer are we going to allow these illegal aliens to send money out of this Country and bring our Country down? Oh, amnesty will correct all this. WRONG! Nothing will change except we wouldn't be able to call them illegal aliens any more. Let's get rid of these illegal aliens! Let's get them back to their own Country where they belong!Illegal immigration is a cancer, it has to be eradicated not tolerated. novenator This is what xenophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria, and yes, even racism (against the brown skinned folks this time) will do to a nation. We have a serious brain drain going on, and the closed-minded, intolerant attitudes of social conservatives is only exacerbating it. Fluffy Mergatryod What childish nonsense, to fling insults when someone disagrees with you. Nobody is falling for that any more. America has too many STEM workers out of work. This is something the average American can plainly see, and it's wrong. The visa folks were only supposed to fill in temporarily where there was a shortage. Instead, studies show that diversity has dropped dramatically where they have been let in. Age, race, and gender discrimination have soared while older American tech workers, minority American tech workers, and female American tech workers have been replaced by young South Asian males. America was once the undisputed world leader in innovation, engineering, and technology. Then we jacked up the H-1B cap. That was a little over a decade ago. We have a saying, "Time will tell." It has. Fluffy Mergatryod When I was in grad school, I was assigned to work on a project with another student, an H-1B working at IBM from India. He was an Oracle DBA. At that time, I knew American Oracle guys who were looking for work. Multiply this example by about a million - some estimates have the cumulative total as high as 3 million. Guestimate what this has done to our STEM job market. Go ahead and guess. zaphodz Based on the comments that pertty much said "good riddencen to the would be immegrants that are leaving", I found it sad. Now I understand why the era of the America is passing and taken over by other countries espeically China. If it wasn't for the Nazies that pissed off guys like big Al Einstein, US would never get a such huge boost in sciense. Would the US eventually came up with necessary sciense to build a nuclear bomb? Yes, but it be too late to be of any use. Today we've got tons of religous nuts and short sighted people dominating the government. Like Europe's super powers before, America has plateaued and from now one could only go down like the Europeans. It will take a long time to get back on top again. Ryan Sheridan What the heck are you talking about? Nobody said good riddance. And another thing, the soviet union got more of the scientists and talent from the end of WWII and how did that work out for them? They do not exist anymore. Bill Nealon Vivek, you're pitching the same tired 'brain drain' nonsense everyone has seen for 2 or 3 years now, to anyone who will listen. Listen - if the visa program hadn't put so many Americans on the sidelines in place of the imported temp workers they had to train, you might have a valid point. The sharp ones have the O-1 visa to come and bring their intellect. But to suggest foreigners are more likely to create successful startups merely because they went to college here is bovine scatology. You're campaigning for your own, and it's rather apparent. Natives here in the US can create startups, but they are out of work - this makes the economy dive and they are far less likely to take the risk. Geez, it's tiresome listening to the same schtick time and again.... new material, please. Fluffy Mergatryod Those 150K were certainly not all job-creating entrepreneurs. If they started companies, it was to sponsor more visas and bring more of their own in. Studies show that Indian companies in America almost never hire Americans. Besides, as has been pointed out, in the overal churn of immigration to and from the US, 150K is no big deal. Everyone who works with H-1Bs knows that maybe 1 out of a thousand is something special. Bon voyage! Jason There isnt an anti-immigrant wave in the country, its anti-illegal immigrant. People here on student visas are here legally and followed the law. No one has complained about that other than an extremely small xenophobic lot that has always existed. Please stop trying to equate the 2 as they are very much not the same thing. And as someone else posted earlier, many immigrants I know and went to school with wanted to go home in the 90's but there wasnt much to go home to. Many of them worked to build themselves up to the point where they could go back and try to bring some prosperity to their homelands. Now the conditions are good for them to do that.We absolutely need to fix our immigration system but we can do so without rewarding the ones who broke the law. I dont understand why people continually fail to understand this. Apple Blossom Millions of people immigrate to the USA every year and you have a wild guess of maybe 150,000 have left over 2 decades? If that's a brain drain, sign me up for a zombie transfusion. Dirk Nice liberal propaganda. Devindra Hardawar Nice contribution to the conversation jimgriffith Nice snarky follow-up! Peter Yared Wow great post! Also the 7 year H1 ticker is a timebomb for engineers and green card applications are the equivalent of indentured servitude. We need to classify categories of jobs that immigrants can fill and give them open ended visas and 6 months windows to find jobs in gaps. 100 years ago America could absorb tons of unskilled labor because of the industrial revolution and the growth was phenomenal. Now we should be absorbing high tech talent from all over the world to fuel the information revolution... rhlmstr Kudos Vivek. You have written here the minds of hundreds of thousands waiting in the 'immigration limbo'. Taffy Williams Anti-immigrant sentiment building across may have a contribution but I do not believe it to be the major reason Immigrants return home. Having spent most of my carreer working with highly educated immigrants, I have found many wanted to return home but jobs were not available. I belive the change in the economy in these countries has created jobs which have allowed those educated immigrants to return and be near their families. @twilli2861 Guest Uhm, sorry, but I'm pretty sure people educating themselves in the States and then leaving has been happening for awhile--it's certainly nothing new. We are the Mecca of education at the moment (just as Rome was) and people come here and then leave--we are a revolving door. The bigger issue is U.S. companies exporting our jobs to India and China to increase their bottom line while our government sits idly by--meanwhile these companies are being protected by conservatives who seem oblivious to the fact that the companies turn around and screw them.I say let 'em leave--how many countries have failed "Silicon Valley" incubators? The innovation is still here. PeterA650 The bigger issue here is you don't have a clue what you're talking about. You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but your narrow minded flag-bearing nationalism is hard to disguise. Guest Please elaborate--just saying someone doesn't know what they're talking about is not an argument and makes YOU look like the idiot. It's called Ad Hominem.While you're looking that up try looking up nationalism in the dictionary while you're at it, chump--attacking U.S. companies for exporting our jobs abroad (and our government for allowing this) doesn't make me a nationalist--I'm not flying any flag, and I'm ATTACKING our nation's policies. Perhaps you don't have a good grip of the English language? jimgriffith I think you meant to say "you don't have a good grasp of the English language"? religous equal This of course shows the ignorance of a lot of people here in the US. We forget that we lead the world with innovation, but with petty issues like this, only the rest of the world, like China, will gain while we lose. blog comments powered by Disqus var disqus_url = 'http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/28/brain-drain-or-brain-circulation-america-is-bleeding-competitiveness/ '; var disqus_container_id = 'disqus_thread'; var facebookXdReceiverPath = 'http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/xd_receiver.htm'; var DsqLocal = { 'trackbacks': [ ], 'trackback_url': 'http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/28/brain-drain-or-brain-circulation-america-is-bleeding-competitiveness/trackback/' }; Search
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