Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China

the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier—precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards.

From "Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China" by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University.

Hopefully, the recession played a part in the return of the sampled 1203 returnees and the exodus of highly educated immigrant workers will slow down when the US economy recovers.

Read the complete TechCrunch article here.

Update: See The Wall St. Journal article, "Immigrant Scientists Create Jobs and Win Nobels" by Susan Hockfield.