Reverse brain-drain may affect US: Study

More than one million skilled immigrant workers, including engineers, doctors and researchers compete for 120,000 permanent US resident visas each year and this imbalance may fuel a reverse brain-drain from America affecting the country, a new study has said.

More than one million skilled immigrant workers, including engineers, doctors and researchers compete for 120,000 permanent US resident visas each year and this imbalance may fuel a reverse brain-drain from America affecting the country, a new study has said.

The situation is even bleaker as the number of employment visas issued to immigrants from any single country is less than 10,000 per year with a wait time of several years, the report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said.

8220;The United States benefits from having foreign-born innovators create their ideas in this country,8221; said Vivek Wadhwa, Wertheim fellow with the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University.

8220;Their departures would be detrimental to US economic well-being,8221; he said.

The earlier studies documented that one in four engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder.

Indian immigrants founded more companies than the next four groups from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan combined.

Researchers found that these companies employed 450,000 workers and generated USD 52 billion in revenue in 2006.

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The key finding from this research is that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the US.

This imbalance creates the potential for a sizable reverse brain-drain from the United States to the skilled workers8217; home countries, the Foundation said.

8220;When foreigners come to the US, 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,8221; Wadhwa added.

Conducted by researchers at Duke University, New York University and Harvard University, the study is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants8217; contributions to the competitiveness of the US economy.

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Earlier research revealed a dramatic increase in the contributions of foreign nationals to US intellectual property over an eight-year period.

Forty-one per cent of the patents filed by the US government had foreign nationals as inventors or co-inventors.

In 2006, 16.8 per cent of international patent applications from the US had an inventor or co-inventor with a Chinese-heritage name, representing an increase from 11.2 per cent 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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Among the key findings of the study titled 8216;Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain8217;, are that foreign nationals residing in the United States were named as inventors or co-inventors in 25.6 per cent of international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006.

This represents an increase from 7.6 per cent in 1998.

The study said foreign nationals contributed to more than half of the international patents filed by a number of large, multi-national companies, including Qualcomm 72 per cent, Merck 038; Co. 65 per cent, General Electric 64 per cent, Siemens 63 per cent and Cisco 60 per cent.