Closing The Borders: Reverse Brain Drain And The Need For Immigration Reform
What do Google, Intel, Yahoo,
e-Bay, Sun Microsystems, and Facebook have in common? Besides being household names and innovative, highly profitable industry leaders, these companies all had immigrant founders or co-founders. Duke and Harvard University’s researcher Vivek Wadhwa revealed that half of Silicon Valley’s engineering and technology companies, and a quarter of those startednationwide between 1995 and 2006, had immigrant founders. In addition, one in every four patents in the World Intellectual PropertyOrganization listed a foreign national residing in the United States as the inventor. These figures are less surprising if we focus on statistics fromthe National Science Foundation, reporting that foreign studentsreceived nearly sixty percent of all engineering doctorates awarded in the United States, over fifty percent of all doctorates in engineering,mathematics, computer sciences, physics and economics, and 40 percentof all doctorates in agricultural sciences. The Bureau of Citizenship andImmigration Services reports that foreign students in the science,technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are disproportionately represented. Read More …