In an intriguing article over at RealClearMarkets, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth makes a new connection between the controversial immigration laws in Arizona and The Great Brain Race‘s discussion of foreign students studying here in the U.S. She concludes that Ben Wildavsky is right in his conclusion that “the new global brain race is to be welcomed, not feared.”
It has been true for a long time that when foreign students receive their graduate degrees from elite American universities, far too many are also shown the door and sent back whence they came. The Great Brain Race shows how this works to America’s disadvantage.
She continues, arguing that it would make economic sense for the U.S. to not only attract the best and brightest students from around the world, but also to make it easy for them to stay here and work in the U.S. post-graduation.
America can attract the best global minds as students, but to keep them here and reap the benefits of our investment in their education and productivity, we need to reform our immigration law. It can be difficult for a bright person overseas to get a U.S. visa, even after being accepted by a first-rank university and given a scholarship. Many more obstacles need to be overcome for newly-graduated women and men who want to stay here.
Why should this be a concern? Essentially, the problem is that America is getting a poor return on the government’s heavy investment in education. Federal and state governments fund a lot of university research, but the same “brilliant students” conducting this research are then sent back to their home countries or elsewhere to work as professionals.
By making it difficult for these brilliant students to stay in America, Congress is dissipating the value America receives from taxpayers’ investments in research. For, the fact is that a significant fraction of graduate students in the United States are assisted financially with funds that come from the federal government, especially in science, technology, and engineering.
Fears that “brain circulation” will lead to “brain drain” have been popularized in the U.S., but they simply don’t reflect the reality of higher education or the economy. Furchtgott-Rott points to another PUP title that made a similar argument about technology developed outside the U.S. as support for Wildavsky’s contentions.
As has Harvard University scholar Amar Bhidé, author of The Venturesome Economy, Wildavsky concludes that the “research discoveries in other nations provide fodder for American innovators” and that the new global brain race is to be welcomed, not feared.
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French novelist Pascal Bruckner’s provocative new book 
010 book 
