From TechCrunch
There Is In Fact A Tech-Talent Shortage And There Always Will Be
By Gregory Ferenstein
For America to maintain its fragile role as the most innovative nation on earth, it must perpetually attract the world’s best and brightest. There will always be trailblazing engineers who stay in their home country, leaving the United States one notch below its potential. Yet, on the heels of comprehensive immigration reform, a new viral economic study claiming that there is no tech talent shortage has skewed the national discussion over why we need to aggressively attract high-skilled immigrants in the first place....
But, of course, it’s not just founders; Berkeley Researcher AnnaLee Saxenian found that one of the secrets to Silicon Valley’s success was immigrant cultural groups, who mentor new arrivals and develop lucrative ties with their family and friends around the world. These highly skilled emigrants are now increasingly transforming the brain drain into “brain circulation” by returning home to establish business relationships or start new companies while maintaining their social and professional ties to the US,” she writes. Global benefits like these aren’t captured in wage data because workers won’t always reside in the U.S....