From Newsweek
by Edward Alden
Lakshminarayana Ganti reached out to me in the spring of 2009, long after he had exhausted every other option. Sixteen months earlier he had been a young man on the rise, living in a waterfront Boston apartment, driving a new BMW, and working long hours for a startup bond-trading firm. By the time he contacted me, he was sleeping in the spare bedroom of his sister’s house in a New Delhi suburb, trying to fill his time with cricket and odd consulting jobs.
He had found my name through a Facebook group set up by young Indian and Chinese scientists and engineers who had built their lives in America only to find themselves involuntarily exiled in their home countries. I had joined the Facebook group in connection with research into visa delays in the aftermath of 9/11....
Technology executives including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Intel’s Paul Otellini have warned for years that restrictions on skilled immigration are forcing companies to expand in other countries where laws make it easier to hire a global workforce. Rather than enlarge its campus in Washington state, Microsoft opened a big software-development facility in Vancouver in 2007. The Canadian facility, Microsoft said in a statement, would “allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly-skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S.”
Not surprisingly, many young would-be immigrants are turning their backs on the U.S. Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University professor [and visiting scholar at the School of Information], and AnnaLee Saxenian, from the University of California, Berkeley [School of Information], interviewed more than 1,000 foreign students at American universities in 2008. The results were alarming. Only 6 percent of the Indians and 10 percent of the Chinese said they planned to remain in the U.S. Three quarters of those surveyed said they feared they could not obtain a visa. “The United States,” Wadhwa concluded, “is experiencing a brain drain for the first time in its history, yet its leaders do not appear to be aware of this.”...