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Smart Immigrants Going Home
olddotter writes "A 24-page paper on a reverse brain drain from the US back to home countries (PDF) is getting news coverage. Quoting: 'Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain," finds that the vast majority of these returnees were relatively young. The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master's degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master's and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups — precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the US economy and to business and job growth." Adding to the brain drain is a problem with slow US visa processing, since last November or so, that has been driving desirable students and scientists out of the country.
It's about time we make some room for real US citizens.
Presumably, most of those people originally wanted to become "real" (is there any other kind?) US citizens as well, but realized they have to jump through too many hoops for it to be worth it.
(or do you mean that "real US citizen" is a White Protestant guy with Anglo-Saxon lineage?)
Of course, you can have those guys working in engineering, physics or biotech fields in US - preferably as citizens - or you can have them working on thermonuclear warheads, delivery systems, and biological weapons in China or Russia. Your pick.
Our educational system has become so damned expensive that only people who don't live here can seemingly afford it. So it makes sense... As to why the visa system is clogged... Maybe the economic hard times have hit government offices partially responsible for it as well? Oh, what sweet revenge. -_- More seriously though, what difference does it make how well we educate people (either people who stay or leave?) if the environmental conditions necessary for real progress are absent? Our intellectual property system has gutted any hopes of "desirable individuals" doing much of anything besides occupying a desk. The medical field is screwed because people are too afraid of litigation to actually practice medicine at less than a 6000% markup on procedures, which is literally killing people who can't afford it anymore. The lawyers are the only ones in this country that are well-off anymore.
It's no wonder people are jumping ship... Some people looked down the length of the bow and see a giant iceberg in front of the USS Our Future. An iceberg made almost totally of greed, because we couldn't look farther than the end of our damn noses as the social problems we're facing. And leaving is the smart thing -- how long until Canada starts patrolling its borders to keep illegal immigrants from the United States out? Probably not long.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
A colleague of mine decided to return to Africa. The money he collected over seven years in the USA would enable him live a better life in his homeland.
A mansion, with a swimming pool and three maids only costs him about 900 dollars to maintain. The respect he would get from the community would be greater and he'll have a chance to eat fresh "organic" fruit.
All in all...good for them...I wish them all the best.
When the economy picks up, I will welcome them to the mighty USA.
Training foreign students served two purposes. First, so we have an opportunity to hire the best and brightest. Secondly, so we can expose them to our culture. What better way is there to bring about change in a country than to train some of their top academic leaders? This is how you bring human rights to China and reduce corruption in Mexico.
Presumably, most of those people originally wanted to become "real" (is there any other kind?) US citizens as well, but realized they have to jump through too many hoops for it to be worth it.
I don't know about that. I live in a city with a high number of educated workers on a visa, and I know a lot of graduate students that will be looking for work on a visa. With a couple of exceptions, they are all pretty adamant about maintaining their citizenship and staying here on a visa only. The reasons vary, but most of them don't want to give up that part of their identity.
Of course this is all anecdotal, but in my experience the majority of the educated immigrants are here for the education and job opportunities, not to stay here permanently.
Maybe you should fix your educational system so you'd have smart people on your own. Of course that means you'd also have to pay real wages to teachers, fire the incompetent ones who are unable to learn anything new, but have laid low long enough so you can't fire them legally, etc.
Oh, and actually teach the kids to think for themselves. In short: I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I'm American, and I can't tell you how much I share this desire for a better pubic educational system for the US. I would very much love to see the average US citizen be able to think for himself, rather than just absorb all the crap thrown at us through too many advertisements every day. If you're an average American (at least, this is my impression from what I see as stereotypes), your computer is Windows, your cable and Internet are Comcast high-speed (which isn't that fast on an absolute scale), you bought your car because either (a) it looks nice or (b) you heard that it's environmentally friendly, you work from 9 to 5 five days a week for a middle-class paycheck. And this little bubble is pretty much your life. It's safe. There's no need to think for yourself; the companies you pay monthly for their services have already done that for you.
Screw that. I wanna make my own decisions about stuff I do and buy!
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
I can't wait for the first wave of immigrant technical workers to reach middle-age. I'm going to laugh my ass off when they start complaining about competition from younger, smarter, harder-working people. I can't wait until they have to visit the chiropractor 2 to 3 times a week for their chronic neck and back pain from all the time they spent hunched over a computer. It'll be amusing when they are completely screwed by the companies they helped build and divorced by their spouses for years of neglect.
I'm guessing that the ones that go back to their countries of origin will be the lucky ones. They'll probably go back to a more "humanly" paced culture that believes that families really do take care of each other instead of farming the old folks out to some Dickensian nursing home.
As long as the U.S. maintains its dominance in the world there will always be some country where the young people will long to be a "corporate tool". Buy hey, I'm not bitter. No, just wiser.
Yes, this.
Give them back all of the management grads.
See if we can export some of ours too.
And one thing I failed to mention that I wish I had (not that it adds much to the argument) is the still present trade deficit. We are buying more than we are selling. What we are selling is largely to ourselves in decreasing numbers.
Actually exports have been rising (until 2009) as well as imports: see here. And keep in mind that those $3 trillion in imports are still pretty small compared with the $13 trillion domestic, non-imported US economy.
On the other hand, a global trade war would risk the $1.8 trillion in US exports and all of their respective jobs (my industry makes 1/3 of its revenue from exports), so let's not mess around with that! Plus it would raise prices on basic consumer goods, which would affect the poor the worst!
H1-B wages are not the problem. By law, an employer is required to pay H1-B at least as much or more than the US market average for the given position.
It is only a violation if you get caught. There is, and always has been, exactly $0 in the government budget for enforcement of the wage parity requirements of the H1B program.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Granted, it hurts to lose educated people from an economy that is in desperate need of new industry (as opposed to new services and new debts) ... but ... America isn't the whole of the world, and the world as a whole has real problems. Educating these people and then dispersing them to the wind like this... it may hurt right now, but what if they take seed in places of the world in greater need of educated people... places with runaway population growth, terrible environmental records, and similarly unsustainable practices?
Heck... beyond that, after a taste of democracy, who is to say all these people going back to their less tolerant homes won't also foment cultural reforms (not that our model is picture perfect right now, but...)
It's a notion, anyways
We need to end the cheap (H1-B) labor for engineering.
If businesses "need" more engineering labor than the market has available, they need to pay for it, just as they would for marketing or management. Instead they suppress the salaries by importing cheap labor from overseas.
We also need to undo some of the cultural bias we have for "management" and stop treating management as some kind of aristocratic/Mandarin class entitled to special wages & privileges above the common people.
I remember that slashdot article.
But, the guy who wrote the article had no intention of actually getting a job in India or China. He was just trying to get somebody to say something stupid at the consulate.
Actually, if you work for a Chinese company, they will put out a press release to the local media that their company is so great that even American want to work for them (it did happen! though it was for a student who was working at a Chinese factory - not really for wages but for experience).
Last week I worked for a company that has their roots here. Now the whole company is moving to India (back to where the owners are from). They have laid off all the American workers and are taking the indian workers home with them. They say that they aren't selling enough of their product here and they can sell their product in those countries back home. So, here we are: where we cannot afford to buy the products that the Indians can afford. The emerging markets are growing and our markets are not. The problem here isn't that we are loosing brain power. The problem here is that we are loosing our whole market. Of course in 10 years this might settle itself out somewhat but what will be left? Lots less than if we had controlled the money system in the first place. The problem is that corporations want something for nothing and then we are all left with lots less. The problem was that the derivative market was printing so much money no government could hope to keep up. Ultimately we rise and fall together (owners and workers), (foreign and american) and we really can't pretend that any other system will work. We have to control thieves, double check the integrity of the products that are sold. We have to keep a careful eye on how those products are produced so we don't kill our planet trying to sustain this crazy consumption lifestyle that we have created. There is no easy answer here.
Also, having a lot of education does not make one highly skilled. Especially younger workers without much experience thrown at jobs that treat technical people as commodities.
Some of the best engineers I've known are highly educated people from China or India. However, some of the worst engineers I've met were also highly educated people from China or India...
It's why I moved back to Canada and decided not to work in the U.S. again, even though I have had a number of calls and offers to come back in the short time I have been away (even in this recession). It leaves me feeling a bit down since I really liked living there in Saint Louis; the first city I have really been home sick over. It drove me crazy that it was such a pain in the ass to get a green card even though I spent all told 7 years there on work visas. I kept my nose clean, at worst I got two parking tickets which I paid, and contributed time and money to a local non profit group that tries to take care of various issues the old blues musicians in town run into (the one's who are poor because of the way they were ripped off on royalties by the same recording companies trying to sue single mothers). Meanwhile I keep hearing how congress wants to grant immunity and green cards to all those who have been living there for more than a couple of years illegally.
Another thing, many Americans don't realize that working on many/most of the various work visas means you have a month to back up and get out of America if your job ends, something that does kind of wear on you after a while... especially in a slowing economy. That is, knowing you might have to not only look for new work if your job ends, but also new work in a different country while still being away (not as easy as if you are there), and finding a new home in a different country and all the moving issues around that. I left the middle of last year from the U.S. (I quit, I didn't get laid off) because of all of those kinds of issues.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..." maybe that is more true than I thought. If I am not poor or longing to be free, if I don't need welfare or government assistance, maybe that's the reason it is so hard to get a green card if you are a computer professional. I should have applied for welfare. Ha! That's it! If I ever do go back to work in the U.S. I'll swim across the border... that way I might have a better chance of getting a green card. When the economy goes south, you want to keep the good minds since they are the ones most likely to help you get it back on the road. The reverse brain drain is a case of the U.S. having its cake and finding out what it's like to want to eat it too.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I wonder if this is because of H1B hiring tendencies. Employers either go with H1B workers because they can't find someone as highly qualified locally as the foreign applicant; or because they want cheap labor.
(granted it's not cheap to go through the H1B process, but if you've got a marginal worker who has to go through a mess of bureacracy to change jobs, you've essentially got indentured labor that you can exploit)