Imagine if every Masters or a PhD grad was given a green card. US would still have been a leader in tech (at least wrt VC spending metric)
From what I have been seeing, the number of both Indian/Chinese students coming to the US for studying has gone down post the Trump administration. Also, I am seeing more Indian/Chinese folks going back home due to increase in engineering wages/opportunities. Of course, it's still not comparable to US but plenty-enough to live a very good life-style back home.
China has really great wages for programming (I should know), but lacks in many quality of life factors. For example, many Chinese won’t go back once they have kids because of educatio, hukou, and pollution factors. They would have to pay a lot to get around those.
Instead of spending time on the product, or building a team, you have to waste time with idiotic immigration laws that were not written keeping the current tech jobs in mind.
So, even if you see an Indian or a Chinese grad stay back in the US, there's very little chance that they end up being entrepreneurs funded by VCs (unless they are from the top 10 universities in the US and started on their venture well before graduating). Not sure about China, but there are quite a few examples of Indian nationals fed up with US immigration laws, going back to India and startup a VC backed tech product company, valued over $100 million.
Yeah, a huge brain drain would result, to the detriment of other countries and the benefit of US.
It's not if you an American.
>Any other country could also open its border to "brains" if they wanted too. The world would probably be better off if smart people (or really any one) could easily migrate to where they can be happiest.
And perhaps we could dispose of the not-so-smart left behind while at it...
Mind: my own theorising, though based on a considerable bit of research.
Monopolies, generally, tend to form around networks, most generally described as flows (material, energy, products, people, information), between nodes, with some cost function. That last isn't just the traditional capital and labour, but a larger set, generally: materials, energy, time, effluent, skill, technical knowledge, O&M, comms protocols (including language choice), access to finance, frictional losses (from hull drag to bribery), and yes, labour and capital.
I'd also add unintended consequenses, though that's a long aside.
Different locations may have favourable or unfavourable standing among various of these factors. Comparative advantage (and disadvantage).
Something like Kirchoff's law of circuit flow may apply, I'm looking into this. There's some prior art, I believe associated with Jules Dupuit.
Edward Glaser, Harvard, makes the interesting observation that cities are an exception to the Anna Karenina principle: major global cities tend to have their own individual focus of competence. This seems particularly the case for ephemeralised goods: television (centering on NYC again), cinema (Hollywood, though, via language frictions, also Bollywood), finance (NYC, though with regional centres in London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo). And of course the San Francisco Bay Area for software, thoughthere are a few other competing centres, notably again NYC.
Glaeser also notes that diverse cities with non-monolithic industries and corporate footprints, tend to maximise diversity -- hecontrasts NYC's garment industry with the company towns of Ford's Detroit and Carnegie's Pittsburgh.
(The bulk material, energy, effluent, and labour requirements of early-20th century auto and steel production are other aspects he fails to dwell on, to his loss.)
But there are also things ccities need to get right: a baseline. Size. Food and water supply. Waste removal, public health, and crime prevention. Transport and tradee. Comms. Quality of life. Fail in these, and aa city wwill decline (though economic failure seems the more apparent proximate cause).
For intellectual and creative activities, opportunity, freedom, removal of barriers & hassles, and lack of oppression, seem key. The mid-20th century transatlantic flow, in both directions, of European Jews west, and American Blacks east, is a particularly inteeresting case: a given location can simultaneously attract and repell.
There are other dynamics: Dutch Disease, Baumal's Cost Disease, Gresham's Law (particularly applicable to brain drain), probably Jevons and Leibig's law.
But getting to your assertion, simply opening borders is far from sufficient.
Anecdotally, majority of them are not high skilled. Masters/PhD should not be used as a valuable metric for green card consideration.
I would suggest you go with different metric of merit.
I live in a third-world country and every single ms/phd I have met were nothing but incompetent.
Edit: I don't know why you are downvoting this but in this country most degrees are bought with money and the ones earned without bribery are earned in an environment where expectations from students are a lot lower than, say, in US.
Pillpack's founder trying to ensure that he can keep the engineer: http://vdc.umb.edu/2018/07/04/can-you-help-our-friend-elliot...
Pillpack was bought by Amazon for ~ $1 billion.
sad part is, even a founder who is a US Citizen, has to waste copious amounts of time navigating these idiotic frustrating US immigration rules, because the star engineer they have is an immigrant.
I had a green card but could not get a job in the US.
Cheers from China. They actually DO need people here.
This is exactly why merit based legal immigration would push US back into the pole position, if it was done right. Lottery green card is basically a new way of excluding people from China and India from immigration, in the name of diversity.
Current situation for high skilled immigrants from India in US, is basically to cross the border to Canada, with it's amazing Express Entry scheme, which treats all immigrants the same, and evaluates each one based on the same scale (of education qualifications and work experience). Unlike the US, Canadian high skilled immigration rules don't discriminate based on country of birth!
My guess: In 10 years, Canada will be giving the US a tough competition for global VC spend
Skate to where the puck is going to be...... :)
"I thought Nanotech was a much coveted field to be in" Me too, but as mentioned before, Ideas are like hemorrhoids. This was mine.
Not sure why. Wrong time. Wrong coast. Bad luck. I had an interview at Agilent. They had 500 applicants. You needed to have a PhD or MBA or both. I was among the last three candidates and they congratulated me, "you got the job". Then they axed the job. There was just a curse on me. Really don't want to think back about that time. Started over in China with nothing. Was basically an illegal immigrant there.
Most people want to live in their own country , with their family, their friends and their language.
Chinese people have elders to care. In China family is sacred to a level individualistic US can not understand.