Kauffman: U.S. risks 'reverse brain-drain' with immigrants
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.
Indian immigrants founded more companies than the next four groups -- from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan -- combined.
These companies' founders tended to be highly educated in science, technology, math and engineering-related disciplines, with 96 percent having bachelor's degrees and 75 percent having a master's or doctorate, Kauffman said.
The most recent study also found that:
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Foreign nationals living in the United States were inventors or co-inventors in 25.6 percent of international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006, up from 7.6 percent in 1998.
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Foreign nationals contributed to more than 50 percent of the international patents filed by a number of large, multinational companies, and 41 percent of the patents filed by the U.S. government had foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors.
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In 2006, 16.8 percent of international patent applications from the United States had an inventor or co-inventor with a Chinese-heritage name, up from 11.2 percent in 1998. The contribution of inventors with Indian-heritage names increased to 13.7 percent from 9.5 percent in the same period.
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The number of employment-based principals in the employment-based categories and their family members waiting for legal permanent residence in the United States in 2006 was estimated at slightly more than 1 million, and an estimated 126,421 residents abroad also were waiting for employment-based U.S. legal permanent residence, for a worldwide total 1.18 million.
Using data from the New Immigrant survey, the authors found that in 2003, about 20 percent of new legal immigrants in the United States and about 33 percent of employment-based new legal immigrants either planned to leave the United States or were uncertain about remaining. The authors had no data about how many foreign nationals had returned to their homelands.
"Given that the U.S. comparative advantage in the global economy is in creating knowledge and applying it to business, it behooves the country to consider how we might adjust policies to reduce the immigration backlog, encourage innovative foreign minds to remain in the country and entice new innovators to come," Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, said in the release.