The authors of Hollowing Out the Middle look at rural brain drain in the Chronicle Review, highlighting the disturbing similarities between inner city and rural downturns, and looking at the ways that small towns can be a key part of our country's economic recovery.
There\u2019s an idea going around in some policy circles that the United States can \u201Cbrain drain\u201D China by getting its best and brightest to move to the U.S. \u2014 in other words, that high-skilled immigration policy could be used as a competitive strategy for Cold War 2. Caleb Watney, for example, tweets:
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The first reason brain-draining China will be hard is that it\u2019s just so huge \u2014 much larger than either the USSR or Germany were. It has four times our population, and it\u2019s minting new STEM PhDs faster than we are:
But an even more fundamental issue is that brain drain, in general, is a myth. It just doesn\u2019t happen, under normal circumstances. The Nazis, who lost a lot of their best scientists and suffered grievously when they pushed out Jews and liberals, are really the exception here. Usually, skilled immigration sets up a virtuous cycle that benefits both the sending country and the host country.
There are several mechanisms by which what looks like \u201Cbrain drain\u201D is actually usually \u201Cbrain gain\u201D. First of all, the opportunity to send researchers abroad can encourage education and high-tech investment in a developing country. Also, scientists, entrepreneurs, and engineers who leave their country to work in another country often return home after a while, bringing back their knowledge and human networks and personal fortunes. But crucially, even if they don\u2019t go back, diaspora scientists often share their knowledge and ideas with people they know back in the old country, which boosts innovation there. A recent paper by Qingnan Xie and Richard B. Freeman finds:
Chinese diaspora authors of scientific papers\u2026produce a large proportion of global scientific papers of high quality, gaining about twice as many citations as other papers of the same vintage\u2026[D]iaspora researchers are a critical node in the co-authorship and citation networks that connect scientific discovery in China with the rest of the world. In co-authorship, diaspora researchers are over-represented on international collaborations with China-addressed authors. In citations, a paper with a diaspora author is more likely to cite China-addressed papers than a non-China addressed paper without a diaspora author; and, commensurately, China-addressed papers are more likely to cite a non-China addressed paper with a diaspora author than a non-China paper without a diaspora author. Through those pathways, diaspora research contributed to China\u2019s 2000-2015 catch-up in science and to global science writ large, consistent with ethnic network models of knowledge transfer, and contrary to brain drain fears that the emigration of researchers harms the source country.
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