The U.S. Needs a Million Talents Program to Retain Technology Leadership | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Needs a Million Talents Program to Retain Technology Leadership

foreignpolicy.com

15 pointsvwoolf13 comments

It’s not just a matter of enticing new immigrants but of retaining bright minds already in the country. In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erdal Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers. Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country. As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.

Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to China. It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster 5G mobile internet services. Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies. Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the patents related to Arikan’s solution—10 times more than its nearest competitor. And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. Had the United States been able to retain Arikan—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work—this history might well have been different.

From the article;

>The United States can also boost retention of tech talent by granting immediate permanent residency to every foreign-born doctoral graduate in the STEM subjects.

i.e. If you get a PhD in STEM in the US, you should get a "Green Card" along with the degree.

This is such a obvious low-effort thing to implement and will pay such enormous dividends that it is hard to fathom the stupidity behind its non-implementation.

It would result in PHD mills, wouldn’t it?

Not necessarily with some proper regulations for accreditation etc. Getting a PhD in STEM in the US is not trivial.

You're only looking at it through the lens of the top universities in the US. There are a few thousand universities in the US and the quality and ease of graduation varies a lot, even with accreditation.

Huawei is a company of over 200.000 people including some of the best engineers in China; the idea that Huawei's success in 5G stems from just one guy is silly.

Huawei invested billions while its competitors focused on cost.

Indeed - while US companies decided to stay on 4G and milk it for longer, Huawei famously invested lots into making end to end offering for 5G

Given working skilled immigrant visa (H1B isn’t) many of these 200k would prefer to work for American companies.

amusing. perhaps if this were 2008.

Honestly I think US management needs retraining. The Xerox PARC era has long passed, and most high functioning teams get merged or dispersed by management eager to cut costs.

The ieee.org source below contradict's Foreign Policy's timeline. Arikan has been a professor for Bilkent University, Ankara since 1987. The paper wasn't published until 2009. That is he had already returned to Turkey long before the paper was published.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37272793600

Erdal Arikan (S’84–M’89–SM’94–F’11) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1981, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1982 and 1985, respectively. Since 1987, he has been with the Electrical-Electronics Engineering Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he is a Professor. He is also the Founder of Polaran Ltd, a company specializing in polar coding products. He was a recipient of the 2010 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the 2013 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, the 2018 IEEE Hamming Medal, and the 2019 Claude E. Shannon Award.

We don’t even have to recruit. We can just fix the catastrophically broken skilled worker visa program.

Attach it to a person not a company. Advanced degree or comparable skill and a job offer should be sufficient. Simplify it so a person can do it without resorting to $10k in legal fees. Remove the cap, actively police and slap down companies abusing of the system instead. Find the program properly so it is fast. I’ve got a friend with an advanced degree in comp sci. I referred him to a FAANG company. He got an offer. He had to leave the country and wait a year before his H1B came in. And he can’t switch companies without a lawyer and permission.

Catastrophically broken is not an exaggeration. Any smart ten year old could invent a better system.

Don't we basically do this via PhD stipends, student visas and NSF grants?

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