Kauffman: U.S. risks 'reverse brain-drain' with immigrants

Our country needs skilled immigrants and this story shows more of the problems in our immigration system. We will suffer if these immigrants stop coming here. DP

Kansas City Business Journal

bizjournals.com: The United States could face a "reverse brain-drain" as skilled immigrant workers return to their home countries because of the limited availability of permanent U.S. resident visas, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation reports in a study it released.

More than 1 million skilled immigrants compete for 120,000 visas a year, the foundation said in a release Wednesday. The United States issues fewer than 10,000 employment visas a year to immigrants from any single country, and the wait time is several years.

Researchers at Duke, New York and Harvard universities conducted the study, titled "Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog and a Reverse Brain-Drain." It is the third in a series of studies focusing 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 during an eight-year period, Kauffman said.

"The United States benefits from having foreign-born innovators create their ideas in this country," Vivek Wadhwa, Wertheim fellow with the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke, said in the release. "Their departures would be detrimental to U.S. economic well-being. And, 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."

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, Kauffman said. Researchers found that these companies employed 450,000 workers and generated revenue of $52 billion in revenue in 2006.
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