Oct 12, 2004

Immigrants and the US's creative crisis

FCNow has an interesting post called : What Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and An Wang Share..

They're all immigrants who came to America and helped to create important
companies:
Google, Sun Microsystems and Wang Laboratories.
But what if Brin had stayed in Moscow, and Khosla remained in India, and Wang had gone to university in Europe? That's the provocative question posed by
Richard
Florida
in "America's Looming Creativity Crisis," an article in the October
issue of the
Harvard Business Review. Florida, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, maintains that "the global talent pool and the high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the sole province of the U.S., and a crucial source of its prosperity, have begun to disperse around the globe."
He notes that several major economies--especially India's and China's--have grown to the point where "they can offer great opportunities for people who stay or return home." Just look at the applications for fall 2004 admission to U.S. graduate schools. The figures show that the number of Chinese applicants is down by 76% and the number of Indian applicants is 58% lower than the previous year.

"The evidence suggests that the country may be losing out on the talents of a host of foreign scientists, engineers, inventors, and other professionals," writes Florida.

1 comment:

  1. Very recently my husband - who is an entrepreneur - jewelry business - was applying for a VISA to the US. Did not get it - and we were discussing the same thing! Isn't US losing out on talent? Thanks for the extra read Gautam!
    Cheers!
    Naina

    ReplyDelete