America’s own brain drain may profit India

Signs with the words “US citizens and permanents only” greeted students at employers’ booths at a recent career fair at Duke University, where I teach. In previous years only government jobs requiring security clearances were labeled off-limits to international students. Foreign-born engineering graduates told me they were disappointed that employers like General Electric, IBM, and Carmax as well as smaller companies would not even interview them. Recruiters told me they were frustrated that they could not fill critical positions. They have few options because the visas they need to hire foreign nationals simply aren’t available.

This visa shortage is a problem for US companies that depend on engineers because significantly more foreign-born students than Americans are completing higher degrees in engineering. According to the American Society of Engineering Education, foreigners account for nearly 45 per cent of masters-level engineering students and 60 per cent of PhDs. The result? Multinationals have little choice but to expand their engineering operations abroad, and smaller businesses that can’t afford to expand overseas are unable to hire the talent they need.

Aaron McQuaid, a customer-support engineer at Cisco’s Research Triangle Park (N.C.) Group, has been helping the tech giant recruit from Duke. He says Cisco currently has more than 1,300 openings. McQuaid says barely 10 per cent of the applicants from Duke were US citizens, none had the skill set he needed, and his group couldn’t find a way to hire highly qualified foreign nationals.

The visa system isn’t working. Right now, when international students complete their degrees in the US, they are allowed to work for up to one year on a practical training visa. After that they must obtain a temporary work visa called an H-1B, which is valid for up to six years. Yes, companies are allowed to hire foreign students during the one-year practical training period. But those I spoke with worry that they won’t be able to keep their recruits beyond this period because H-1B visas are in short supply.

With the number of available visas drying up, there’s no easy way for the current batch of international students to stay. This means they need to find jobs back home or in other countries. Additionally, there is already a backlog of more than a million skilled immigrants working in the US, mostly on H-1B visas, who are waiting for a yearly allocation of 120,000 permanent-resident visas. So we are headed for a massive reverse brain drain of skilled workers and students.

Our loss is likely to be the gain of countries like India and China.

Recently Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer for Cisco, paid a visit to Duke. Elfrink said he expects to hire 7,000 engineers over the next five years and to have 20 per cent of Cisco’s top talent located in India. He encouraged Duke students to apply for jobs in Bangalore. Will our current crop of foreign-born graduates end up in India or China?
Gauravjit Singh, 24, and his team won a $100,000 prize last September from Duke’s CURE business plan competition. He then co-founded a medical-device company to equip clinicians in the developing world with an affordable technology in the fight against cervical cancer.

They outsourced the technology development to a Cary design firm. Given how hard it is to get a visa, Gauravjit sees no choice but to return home and run his venture from Bangalore.  Jaineel Aga, 23, says he may have made the wrong decision about studying in the US instead of Europe. The reason he picked the US was because he believed it was more open and welcoming to international students. He considers it a travesty that his career may ultimately be decided by a visa lottery. Tanya Srivastava, 24, says she never planned to stay permanently in the US but did want to work for a few years to get some global experience. But she believes she can easily get a job back home in India if things don’t work out here. All these students said they would discourage their friends from coming to the US.

Unlike many of the problems facing the US, this one isn’t hard to fix. All we need to do is increase the number of visas that are available for international students who get job offers from US companies. An even better solution is to offer these students permanent-resident visas rather than H-1Bs. In the new global landscape, we need the world’s best talent on our side.

The writer is Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University.