'US should abolish H1B visa to prevent reverse brain drain'

WASHINGTON: A leading Indian researcher has suggested that the US abolish the H1B visa and instead issue more green cards to prevent a reverse brain drain.

Vivek Wadhwa, an executive-in-residence at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, made the remarks after coming out with the "startling" statistics of a survey headed by him which found that immigrants were key founders in more than a quarter of all the engineering and technology companies set up in the US between 1995 and 2005.

Wadha said the study calls for substantial relaxations in US immigration policy, and made a strong case for Indians in particular, pointing out that Indians founded more engineering and technology companies in the US in the decade up to 2005 than the next four groups combined -- those from the UK, China, Taiwan and Japan.

"Indians are among the best educated of all immigrant groups," he said, adding they accounted for 26 per cent of all start-ups, about 117,000 jobs and USD 14 billion in revenue in 2005.

But that trend could be arrested or reversed as large numbers of skilled Indian immigrants are returning home because of the six-to-10 years it takes for their green cards -- or permanent immigrant status -- to arrive, Wadha said.

"This is a double loss for the US. One is that we lose good people. The second loss is that they will become our competitors," he notes, adding that this is true for many Chinese, Russian and European immigrants too.

In order to curb the outflow of immigrant talent, Wadha suggests that the H1-B (temporary, non-immigrant) visa be abolished altogether. "Instead, (we should) expand the number of green cards we issue to skilled immigrants and allow these skilled immigrants to come in on permanent visas," he said.

H1-B visas are problematic because they distort salaries,"and they do reduce American salaries; the critics are right about that," says Wadhwa, according to Forbes.com.

"If you come on an H1-B visa, your wife cannot work and she cannot get a driver's license. For six or 10 years, you cannot buy a house, because you don't know if you are going to be here or not."

Wadhwa argues that H1-B visas enable employers to exploit the vulnerability of skilled temporary workers. "No matter what we say, if you have an employee who can't leave you, you are not going to pay him more money than you have to," he said. "You are not going to treat him as nicely as someone who can leave."

The research scholar is also leading another research project that looks specifically at the share of immigrant patents, and a study that looks at the contributions of Indians and Chinese to that total.

More than three-quarters of the immigrant founders surveyed came to the US after 1980, but took an average of 13 years after arrival to set up their firms.

In what may run counter to conventional wisdom, the research showed that more than half (53 per cent) of immigrant founders of technology and engineering companies secured their basic undergraduate degrees in their home countries.

They went on to acquire their highest degrees from US universities.

About 91 per cent of Indian immigrant founders completed their undergraduate degrees in India, while that number was 35 per cent for Chinese immigrants and 97 per cent for the Taiwanese. "This shows that undergraduate education in India is pretty good," said Wadhwa.

Companies founded by immigrants tended to cluster in the country's major technology centres, which also predictably overlapped with concentrations of immigrant population, the study found.

Unlike in earlier years, Wadhwa doesn't expect the Indian government, for one, to lobby for easier green cards for its people in the US. "Right now, India wants its people to come back home," he said.
   
"India has gone from a country which was dependent on revenues from foreign workers to one that is booming on its own. It needs all the skilled people it can get," he said.