|
Brain Drain
When smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the seeds of tomorrow's innovation. Almost 25 percent of all international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006 named foreign nationals as inventors. Immigrants founded a quarter of all U.S. engineering and technology companies started between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. In 2005 alone, immigrants' businesses generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.Yet rather than welcome these entrepreneurs, the U.S. government is confining many of them to a painful purgatory. As of Sept. 30, 2006, more than a million people were waiting for the 120,000 permanent-resident visas granted each year to skilled workers and their family members. No nation may claim more than 7 percent, so years may pass before immigrants from populous countries such as India and China are even considered. Why does all this matter? Because just as the United States has relied on foreigners to underwrite its deficit, it has also depended on smart immigrants to staff its laboratories, engineering design studios and tech firms. An analysis of the 2000 Census showed that although immigrants accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, they made up 47 percent of all scientists and engineers with doctorates. What's more, 67 percent of all those who entered the fields of science and engineering between 1995 and 2006 were immigrants. What will happen to America's competitive edge when these people go home? Immigrants who leave the United States will launch companies, file patents and fill the intellectual coffers of other countries. Their talents will benefit nations such as India, China and Canada, not the United States. America's loss will be the world's gain. luddites Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2009-03-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=264475 |