Study Points to 'Brain-Drain' of Skilled U.S. Immigrant Entrepreneurs

More than one million skilled immigrant workers and their families are competing for 120,000 permanent U.S. resident visas each year, resulting in many of the workers to return to their home countries

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

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Durham, NC -- More than one million skilled immigrant workers -- including Indian and Chinese scientists and engineers -- and their families are competing for 120,000 permanent U.S. resident visas each year. This sizeable imbalance is likely to fuel a “reverse brain-drain” with skilled workers returning to their home countries, according to a new report from researchers at Duke and other universities released Wednesday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
 
The situation is even bleaker as the number of employment visas issued to immigrants from any single country is less than 10,000 per year, with a wait time of several years.
 
“The United States benefits from having foreign-born innovators create their ideas in this country,” said Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and Wertheim Fellow with the Harvard Law School. “Their departures would be detrimental to U.S. economic well-being. When foreigners come to the United States, collaborate with Americans in developing and patenting new ideas, and employ those ideas in business in ways they could not readily do in their home countries, the world benefits.”
 
Ben Rissing, a research scholar at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, and Gary Gereffi, a professor of sociology and director of the Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness at Duke, are among the other authors of the study. The other co-authors are Guillermina Jasso of New York University and Richard Freeman of Harvard University.

The study is the third in a series that focuses on immigrants’ contributions to the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Earlier research revealed a dramatic increase in the contributions of foreign nationals to U.S. intellectual property over an eight-year period.
 
In this study, “Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain,” researchers offer a more refined measure of this rise in contributions of foreign nationals to U.S. intellectual property and analyze the possible impact of the immigrant-visa backlog for skilled workers. The key finding from this research is that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the United States. This imbalance creates the potential for a sizeable reverse brain-drain from the U.S. to the skilled workers’ home countries.

The full report can be downloaded from the foundation’s website at www.kauffman.org, where a similar version of this news release is also available.