It Can’t Be the Food

When we think of educated immigrants coming to the United States to do research, pursue highly advance post-graduate education or to create new businesses with new ideas, our minds tend to gravitate to the brilliant influx of graduates of India’s superb Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) or comparable institutions in China (like Beijing’s Tsinghua University, pictured above). There are 15 IITs – all specialized scientific and engineering universities – and every year 7,900 students are selected from a pool of 400,000 applicants, most through a battery of the most competitive entrance exams on earth. So many new jobs have been created with inventions and business plans from these Asian émigrés that I have often joked that if they all left the United States one day, it would be a matter of days, perhaps hours, before our telecommunications, Internet and power grid would begin to fail.

What we don’t expect is how attractive the United States is to highly-trained Europeans, and most unusually, to French academics. While colleges and universities in the United States face budget cuts and recession-driven contraction, for those at the top of their fields, their jobs and facilities still continue, even if they too face economic impairments. What U.S. academic scholars faces is relatively mild when compared to the austerity programs Europe’s new conservative governments have imposed, job killers and recession-extenders all in the name of anti-inflationary deficit reduction. While parallel trends exist in the U.S., the emphasis here is still on job-creation.

But the influx of French academics started long before the current financial meltdown. Zut alors! We’ve been watching a steady increase in professorial superstars coming to American universities for years: “A study by the Institut Montaigne found that academics constitute a much larger percentage of French émigrés to the United States today than 30 years ago: 27 percent of the total from 1996 to 2006, compared with 8 percent from 1971 and 1980. In particular, many of France’s best biologists and economists are now in the United States.” New York Times, November 28^th. Why? Better pay, more money for research and a greater appreciation of complex scientific achievement.

Not that Europeans haven’t retaliated. Peter Baldwin (a UCLA history professor), writing for the Times, notes: “Berkeley has just lost the Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot to Paris; my brother, an eminent biochemist, is at Jena; Lorraine Daston, a historian of science, runs an institute in Berlin; Peter Mandler – erstwhile Californian – is at Cambridge. Richard Sennett decamped from even New York to London…And within Europe, British universities have long been soaking up all the talented, English-proficient, but domestically unemployable products of German universities. The faculty of the ETH Zurich (Europe’s M.I.T.) is well over half foreign-born, while only 5 percent of Stanford’s is. So let’s not exaggerate the direction of the flows.”

Since most academic studies are published in English, fluency in our mother tongue is seldom a barrier.

But as Asia does a “man up,” particularly China where tons of foreign currency reserves are now devoted to luring ethnically-Chinese engineering and scientific academics back to China with vastly enhanced pay and research budgets, we face new challenges. Case in point: Earlier this year, Princeton University’s molecular biologist, Dr. Shi Yigong, a cancer researcher, turned down a $10 million grant to become the dean of life sciences at Tsinghua University. In 2007, Rao Yi, a 47-year-old biologist, left Northwestern University left to Tsinghua University for a similar reason. Whatever we may feel about folks immigrating to the United States, the top of the academic food chain – particularly in science and engineering – is a profound value to us no matter where they may be coming from.

Our own colleges and universities cannot remotely keep up with the demand for the highest levels of such skills, so if we do not absorb such academic immigrants, we become less competitive and the number of new patents and resulting jobs drop proportionately. Indeed, the number of “hard patents” issued in the U.S. is falling just as patents in China are rising. If we are to have a future, we need to keep the “lure” of American academic opportunities as a national priority.

I’m Peter Dekom, and years of a “little chipping away” can have huge long-term consequences.