That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [124]
There’s another, increasingly promising, destination: home. New research shows that many immigrants have returned to their native countries—especially India and China—to enjoy what they see as a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of nearby family and friends. The trend has accelerated in the past few years, in part because these workers have also lost patience with the U.S. visa backlog. At the end of 2006, more than a million professionals and their families were in line for the yearly allotment of just 120,000 permanentresident visas. The wait time for some has been longer than 10 years.
All this matters, Wadhwa writes, “because immigrants are critical to our long-term economic health. Although they represent just 12% of the U.S. population, they have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies and contributed to more than 25% of U.S. global patents. They make up 24% of science and engineering workers with bachelor’s degrees and 47% of those with Ph.D.s.” He and two colleagues conducted a survey of 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants to the United States who had returned to their home countries. The vast majority were young and highly skilled, and had earned advanced degrees. Asked why they had left, 84 percent of the Chinese and 69 percent of the Indians cited professional opportunities. For the vast majority, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element. Asked if U.S. visa issues played a role in their decisions, a third of the Indians and a fifth of the Chinese answered in the affirmative. Most of the returnees, Wadhwa said, “seem to be thriving. With demand for their skills growing in their home countries, they’re finding corporate success. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China.”
Some opponents of reforming the visa system to attract and keep more highly skilled non-Americans have charged that giving a job to a foreigner takes a job away from a U.S. citizen. In some cases, Wadhwa noted in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article (May 4, 2009), that is true. Some companies have used H-1B visas to hire foreign labor to lower their labor costs. “But in the aggregate, the preponderance of evidence shows that the more foreigners are working in science and technology jobs in the U.S., the better off the U.S. economy is. Increasingly, the number of H-1B holders in a region correlates to increased filings of patents in that region. And for every 1% increase in immigrants with university degrees, the number of patents filed per capita goes up 6%.”
American immigration policy today is just “plain stupid,” concluded Peter Schuck of the Yale Law School and John Tyler, general counsel of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which studies innovation. They noted in an essay in The Wall Street Journal (May 11, 2011) that of “more than one million permanent admissions to the U.S. in 2010, fewer than 15% were admitted specifically for their employment skills. And most of those spots weren’t going to the high-skilled immigrants themselves, but to their dependents.” The H-1B program that gives a pass for high-skilled immigrants to work in America on renewable three-year visas, which can lead to permanent status, is tiny. “The current number of available visas,” they added, “is only one-third what it was in 2003.”
It cannot be said often enough: Well-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups, which come from smart, creative, inspired risk takers. There are only two ways to get more of these people: growing more at home by improving our schools, and importing more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely we need to do both. “When you get this happy coincidence of high-IQ risk takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-IQ