~ S P E C I A L ~
F E A T U R E
~
An Excerpt
From
Flight
Capital:
The
Alarming Exodus of America's Best and
Brightest
by David Heenan
October 2005 -
Davies-Black
Publishing
Give
me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free …
--
Emma Lazarus
Forget terrorism. Forget weapons of
mass destruction. The next global war will
be fought over human capital. For years,
immigrants provided a constant pipeline of
brainpower to the United States. From
Alfred Hitchcock to Albert Einstein, a
steady stream of energetic and highly
skilled newcomers yearning to breathe free
propelled America's ascendancy.
Today, the country continues to benefit
enormously by being a magnet for inventive
and ambitious people who stimulate the
economy, create wealth and improve overall
living standards. Chinese and Indian
immigrants run nearly a quarter of Silicon
Valley's high-tech firms. Eight of the 11
Americans who shared Nobel prizes in
physics and chemistry in the past three
years were born elsewhere. Nearly 40
percent of MIT graduate students are from
abroad. More than half of all PhDs working
here are foreign-born, as are 45 percent
of physicists, computer scientists and
mathematicians. One-third of all physics
teachers and one-quarter of all women
doctors immigrated to this country.
However, the United States can no
longer live off of its transplanted
foreigners. Beginning in the 1990s, a
giant sucking sound could be heard as
their native countries improved
economically and politically. Many of
America's best and brightest began
hotfooting it home in search of another
promised land.
A decade ago, Edward Tian said goodbye
to Lubbock, Texas, his pickup truck,
horseback riding and seven years of
studying brown snakeweed to return to
Beijing. He took home a Texas Tech
doctorate in ecology and a small Internet
software company he co-founded in Dallas.
That business, Nasdag-listed AsiaInfo,
went on to become China's premier
systems-integration company, creating as
much as 70 percent of China's Internet
infrastructure. "I wanted to do something
to change people's lives in the next five
years, not the next 200 years," says the
41-year-old entrepreneur. (On the heels of
AsiaInfo's success, Tian went off to found
telecom giant China Netcom, where he
serves as chief executive.)
After centuries of importing
brainpower, the United States is now a net
exporter. In the past few years, nearly
200,000 foreign-born Americans -- many of
them, like Dr. Tian, highly talented
techies -- have returned to their
motherland every year. This reverse brain
drain, or "flight capital," stimulated in
part by lucrative government incentives,
has spawned flourishing new scientific
havens from South Asia to
Scandinavia.
Given the departure of Tian and many
others, it was perhaps inevitable that the
land of opportunity would turn its back on
newcomers. In the aftermath of the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, more and more
Americans have sought to pull up the
drawbridge. U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services has issued fewer
temporary H1 B work and student visas and
applied much stiffer requirements for
newcomers. The anti-immigrant sentiment
could not have come at a worse time.
Survey after survey reveals that the
United States faces a massive labor
shortage, particularly for
knowledge-oriented workers. The same is
true for Germany, Japan and the other
industrial powers. But while many
countries are extending the welcome mat to
gifted outsiders, the United States is
taking the opposite tact. On its present
course, our nation of immigrants could
become a nation of emigrants.
Credit Taiwan for inciting the exodus.
With the creation of its Hsinchu
Science-Based Industrial Park in the
1980s, the Republic of China began cashing
in on the knowledge-economy sweepstakes,
recruiting hundreds of Taiwan-born
engineers and scientists from the United
States with valuable skills, experience
and contacts. Located near top
universities and government research
institutes and offering low-cost land,
green vistas and a minimum of bureaucracy,
the Silicon Valley-style technology park
helped spur a high-tech gold rush,
building a critical mass of repatriated
"brainiacs." Roughly one-third of its
companies were founded by returnees from
America. One of the first recruits was
Stanford-educated Miin Wu, who, in turn,
enticed a group of 28 Taiwanese homeboys
to launch Macronix International Co.,
Ltd., in Hsinchu. "When I was at Intel, I
dreamed of starting my own company,"
recalls Wu. "Here we mix a U.S. technology
base with Taiwanese manufacturing
technology." Today, the manufacturer of
high-end computer chips boasts a stock
market capitalization of $2
billion.
Following the footsteps of the
Taiwanese, Singapore also is rolling out
the red carpet to foreign scientists and
entrepreneurs. One highly prized
globetrotter is Hong Kong-born Edison Liu,
former director of clinical sciences at
the U.S. National Cancer Institute, who
was wooed to head the glitzy Singapore
Genome Institute. "It's a little like
surfing -- you see a great wave and you
paddle like crazy to catch it," says Liu
of his new employer. "What they have done
in coordinating investment, immigration,
education, infrastructure and medical
systems have been masterful. It's the most
astounding social engineering I've seen in
my life."
Even Vietnam is trying to clone its
transplanted talent. For years, its nearly
2.7 million emigrants -- a community half
the size of Ho Chi Minh City -- were
called Viet Kieu, or "overseas
Vietnamese." More than half -- 1.5 million
-- live in the United States. In the early
1990s, they started to trickle back to
check out the new, more liberalized
Vietnam. Now, the trickle has become a
flood, with up to 300,000 a year, many of
them returning permanently.
One prodigal son is David Thai, a
29-year-old Californian who left his
homeland in 1972. After graduating from
the University of Washington, he revisited
Vietnam with $700 to look for an
opportunity. Today, Thai runs a successful
string of coffee shops in Hanoi and has
investments in a coffee plantation and a
coffee-export business. With its darker
years behind it, the Communist-controlled
government is pulling out all stops to
make other Viet Kieu feel welcome,
including posting jobs on VietnamExpress
and VietnamWorks, Web sites directed at
overseas Vietnamese. Vietnam is even
making a major push to turn itself into an
outsourcing powerhouse. One wonders: What
would Ho Chi Minh think?
Many of these well-trained fugitives
are more turned off by America's values
than its vexing, heavy-handed immigration
policies. Single-parent families, bare
midriffs, drugs and public vulgarity --
the dumbing down of the U.S.A. -- are
especially troublesome. Second-rate
schools focus more on metal detectors than
mathematics. Others paint the country in
darker hues, complaining about the
national obsession with power and money.
"A culture with no culture," is how one
disenchanted scientist puts it. Three
years ago, Kwume M. Botsu, vice president
for Rising Data Solutions, an Internet
call company based in Gaithersburg, Md.,
returned to Ghana to set up a 100-employee
operation. The 20-year IBM veteran traded
in his white button-down for a dashiki,
the colorful African-print shirt of his
homeland -- largely to reconnect with his
core values.
Sensing these attitudinal shifts, many
countries also are intensifying their
courtship of homegrown Americans. One
Yankee joining the wanderlust is Norman
Prouty. The 60-ish executive arrived in
Bangalore in 1992 to provide venture
capital to high-tech entrepreneurs in
India's "Silicon Plateau." The Yale
graduate worked for 35 years in senior
financial jobs at Citibank and Lazard
Frères. Rather than retire, he
brought a lifetime of powerful contacts
and business acumen to the capital-starved
country. Why India? It houses the world's
largest English-speaking population
outside the United States. Since most
software engineering is done in English,
this is a major advantage. In addition,
the world's second-most populous nation
has 4 million scientific and technical
professionals, including thousands who
hold American doctorates.
Already Prouty's company, ICF Ventures,
has done dozens of deals to fund Indian
start-ups. "Our funds come from some of
the United States' most successful
investment bankers, venture capitalists
and institutions," says the transplanted
expat. "These people have ridden some very
fast horses in the U.S., and in India they
see the opportunity to ride even faster
ones."
For Sandra "Sam" Gershenfield, a
slower, not faster, pace was the
watchword. When terrorists flew two
airplanes right into the place she was
working as a top business consultant, she
headed straight for the safest spot she
could think of: New Zealand. "The U.S. had
just become so unsafe and scary," she says
from her new digs north of Auckland. "I'm
so incredibly grateful to be here. If I
had to describe this experience in one
sentence, it's this: I found
peace."
For many years, the United States
benefited from minimal competition in
stockpiling talent. But in the ebb and
flow of globalization, attractive
alternatives are available elsewhere. "We
are losing our lead every day," warns
Andrew S. Grove, the Hungarian
émigré who co-founded Intel
and made Silicon Valley all but synonymous
with the entrepreneurial spirit that
drives the Innovation Economy. "The
distance between us and the rest of the
world is eroding every day, because
knowledge doesn't stay confined and people
don't stay confined."
The United States is between Scylla and
Charybdis. It has two choices: Develop
more home-grown talent or import more
talented workers from abroad. The first
option is unlikely to produce results, at
least in the short term. Therefore, the
nation will have to attract and retain
more immigrants, while holding on to its
existing pool of native- and foreign-born
brainpower. Simply put, America can no
longer afford to see its human capital
voluntarily abandon ship.
Of course, any serious effort to break
the reverse brain drain is not a cure-all
for the nation's burgeoning talent
deficit. However, spurring immigration
reform, extending the welcome mat, and
targeting high-potential foreigners can
help strengthen America's
knowledge-oriented workforce. But
attracting and retaining imported
brainpower is only half the loaf; the
other half is upgrading the quantity and
quality of our native-born sons and
daughters. Therefore, the United States
must place equal attention on thorny
problems, such as reforming public
education, upgrading universities,
stimulating science and technology -- and
a good deal more.
America cannot afford to equivocate.
For centuries, our leaders have responded
to similar challenges. Yet, history offers
many examples of other great countries
that came to catastrophic ends because of
their unwillingness to respond to change.
Nothing short of meeting this threat will
safeguard America's talent base and shape
the kind of society in which our children
and their children will prosper. The time
to act is now.
About the Author: David
Heenan is a leading expert on
globalization and author of Flight
Capital: The Alarming Exodus of America's
Best and Brightest. His career in
business and academia has taken him from
Citigroup and Jardine Matheson to the
B-schools at Wharton and Columbia. Today
he serves as a trustee for the Estate of
James Campbell, one of the nation's
largest landowners with assets of more
than $2 billion. Contact him at www.flight-capital.com.
Order
at Amazon
Read
Dr. Dolhenty's Review of This
Book
Copyright © 2005
by David Heenan. Reproduced here with
permission.
|
