The Hindu Business Line : ‘Skilled workers from India, China leaving US shores’

Reverse triggers
Number of skilled workers waiting for visas larger than number that can be admitted.
Employment visas issued to immigrants less than 10,000/year, with long wait-time.
Study by researchers at Duke University, New York University, Harvard University.

T.E. Raja Simhan

Chennai, Oct. 17In the next couple of years Indian companies will have access to increased number of skilled workers returning home from the US. For the first time, the US is facing the prospect of a ‘reverse brain-drain’ with skilled workers returning to countries like India and China, according to a recent report.

Over a million skilled immigrant workers, including scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers and their families, compete for 1,20,000 permanent US resident visas each year. This creates an imbalance that could fuel a “reverse brain-drain”, according to a report, Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain, released by the US-based 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 waiting time of several years, says the report.

Return triggers

Mr Ravi Viswanathan, head of Chennai operations, Tata Consultancy Services, says three years back the company received one resume a day from people in the US wanting to return home. Today, at any point of time, there are half-a-dozen such resumes. Delay in permanent visa issuance and increasing opportunity in India is forcing people to return home.

The report said that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the US. This imbalance creates the potential for a sizeable reverse brain drain from the US to the skilled workers’ home countries.

The study conducted by researchers at Duke University, New York University and Harvard University, is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants’ contributions to the competitiveness of the US economy.

Earlier studies

The earlier studies, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” and “Entrepreneurship, Education and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part II,” documented that one in four engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder.

Researchers also found that these companies employed 4,50,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006. Indian immigrants founded more companies than those from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan combined.

Key findings

The key findings in the latest report are that foreign nationals contributed to more than half of the international patents filed by a number of large, multi-national companies, including Qualcomm (72 per cent), Merck & Co (65 per cent), General Electric (64 per cent), Siemens (63 per cent) and Cisco (60 per cent).

Forty-one per cent of the patents filed by the US government had foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors.

In 2006, 16.8 per cent of international patent applications from the US had an inventor or co-inventor with a Chinese-heritage name, representing an increase from 11.2 per cent in 1998. The contribution of inventors with Indian-heritage names increased to 13.7 per cent from 9.5 per cent in the same period.

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