The coming fracas over emigration?

On the new books shelf of our university library I found last week David Heenan's Flight Capital: The Alarming Exodus of America's Best and Brightest (Mountain View, CA: Davis-Black Publishing). Davis-Black Publishing is listed as a division of CPP, Inc., also of Mountain View. The Silicon Valley location is perhaps suggestive of their primary client base. CPP's website reveals that they sell

some of the world's leading assessments--including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and Strong Interest Inventory® instruments-- and support materials. Trainers, consultants, HR professionals, executive coaches, and psychologists use CPP products and services to help their clients take the guesswork out of personal and professional growth.

Heenan begins his argument by noting the importance of skilled immigrants to US scientific, technological, and economic success:

Chinese and Indian immigrants run nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley's high-tech firms. Half of the Americans who shared Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry in the past seven years were born elsewhere. Nearly 40 [percent of MIT graduate students are from abroad. More than half of all Ph. D.s working here are foreign-born, as are 45 percent of physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. One third of all physics teachers and one fourth of all women docytors immigrated to this country.

He then argues that in the 1990s the improvement of conditions in these immigrants' native countries began to induce large numbers of them to return home. "In a world economy that placed an increasing premium on knowledge, many of America's best and brightest began hotfooting it home in search of another promised land."

The heart of the book is a series of case studies of countries benefiting from this pattern: Ireland, Iceland, India, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Israel, and Mexico. What seems common to all the cases is a government that has a keen appreciation of its position in the international division of labor, a willingness to invest in preparing for the future, and a business-state relationship that is symbiotic rather than parasitic.

His conclusion chapter has the predictable case against outsourcing, but also suggests a less obvious series of innovations that are supposedly tailored to exploit the current situation: improve immigration policies to remove barriers to skilled workers; change the constitution to allow immigrants to become president after a suitable residence period (the Schwarzenegger amendment?); work to attract highly skilled immigrants and (by implication) de-emphasize the re-uniting of families in US immigration policy; learn to live with those who have dual loyalties; get serious about improving American K-12 and higher education; elevate the social status of science and technology ("Nurture the Nerds!"); broaden workforce participation and defer retirement, and revive and treasure the concept of national service.

Although these suggestions have an off-the-cuff quality, they are a useful place to begin a discussion rather than the conclusion of one. They certainly are a more attractive set of ideas than the simple injunction to accept the "inevitability" of globalization and the equally inevitable slide in American living standards.