The Cost of the Brain Drain

During the year 1963, sixteen Nigerian doctors were working as residents and interns in United States hospitals. To Americans, who have one doctor for every 690 people, this was a small number — less than one hundredth of one percent of our total physician population. But Nigeria is a country with just one doctor per 50,000 people. These sixteen absent doctors were a severe loss, largely offsetting the nineteen new medical degrees granted that year by Nigeria’s one medical school.

In 1962, the Dominican Republic had just rid itself of Trujillo, and its people were looking forward at last to a freer, more prosperous life, To achieve such progress the country needed engineers, and 65 wengraduated from its universities. But in that same year, 44 Dominican engineers emigrated to the United States, wiping out two thirds of this increase in needed technical manpower.

In 1966, 806 Koreans came to the United States on student visas. Such visas are granted on the assumption that recipients will pursue their education here, and then return to their homelands to put their new knowledge to work. Yet in 1966 also, 360 Koreans here on such visas adjusted their status to permanent U.S. resident, indicating that they were in this country to stay.

The countries efted are on separate continents, thousands of miles apart. Yet they have much in common. Each is poor, with citizens striving for better lives. I n each the United States has invested millions in economic and technical aid. And from each we are siphoning off desperately needed professional and leadership talent to meet American manpower shortages.

They are but three examples of developing countries suffering from the “brain drain,” the flow of professional manpower from the lands of the poor to the lands of the rich — above all, into the United States.

Permanent migration

Further examples could be cited of brain drain damage to particular countries. A full appreciation of the problem, however, requires that we look at its total dimensions. And the worldwide statistics are every bit as grim.

Over 8000, or about 20 percent of all the residents and interns in United States hospitals, were born and educated in developing countries, and this percentage has tripled in the past fifteen years. Many of the doctors eventually return home. But those who immigrated permanently in the year 1966 — 1614 — equaled 15 percent of the annual output of our medical schools. This brain drain has at least canceled out all the medical aid, public and private, that we have provided developing nations.

Poor countries provide us well over 1000 engineers annually, and more than 500 scientists. Charles V. Kidd, executive secretary of the federal Council for Science and Technology, has called this loss a “national catastrophe” for many nations, since they have so few who can provide a base for scientific and technological progress.

As demonstrated in a recent staff study by a House Government Operations subcommittee chaired by Congressman Reuss of Wisconsin, the brain drain undoes most of the good provided by our universities in educating foreign students. In 1966, about 6000 such students from developing countries earned undergraduate and advanced degrees here in science, engineering, or medicine. Emigration from these countries in these professions was 4390, eliminating three fourths of the gain.

Permanent migration of engineers, scientists, and medical personnel from developing countries to our own has grown 250 percent in ten years, compared with a 25 percent increase in the flow from advanced nations. In the past year alone, elimination of the “national origins” immigration quota system has more than doubled Asian professional immigration, bringing it to about 6000.

Shortage of trained leaders

A nation proud of its immigrant origins would not find these figures disturbing if it could safely ignore the plight of developing nations today. That we cannot do. Pope Paul VI was simply citing an obvious truth when he asked at the end of his March encyclical, “If the new word for peace is development, who would not wish to labor for it with all his powers?” One evening with the Huntley-Brinkley Report suffices to show the link between violence and underdevelopment today, whether in Vietnam, or India’s food riots, or Nigeria’s tragic civil war, or during hot summers here at home.

We could also ignore the brain drain if highly trained manpower were a surplus commodity in developing countries. And in a few specialized cases it may be. But the dominant situation is well stated by the President’s Science Advisory Committee in its exhaustive report on the world food problems. “The scarcest and most needed resource in the developing countries,” the committee concludes, “is the scientific, technical, and managerial skill needed for systematic, orderly decision-making and implementation.”

This is exactly the type of people we are attracting. The others can’t get through immigration anymore.

Poor countries cannot progress without self-help, and to shape brighter futures they need leaders. If we take growing numbers of potential leaders from them, we can hardly remain indifferent to the results. Yet we have nonetheless heard a growing brain drain “backlash,” a chorus of protests in American intellectual and official circles that this problem is exaggerated, or distorted, or insolvable.

Professors vs. politicians

Learned professors construct economic models to prove that a country loses nothing from a professional’s leaving — conveniently overlooking the substantial public funds invested in his education. Administrators from universities which profit materially from the brain drain argue on moral grounds that we should do nothing to restrict “freedom of movement” — a right apparently the preserve of the well educated.

The academic world, however, does not make our foreign policy. More disturbing, therefore, are the public statements of those who do. The most comprehensive such statement is a staff report released early this year by Charles Frankel, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. The product of two years of work by the federal Inter-Agency Council on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, it is intended as both a major statistical resource and a general U.S. policy statement.

On both counts it is disappointing. For example, it argues that foreign students here constitute only a small portion of the brain drain when compared with professionals trained before their arrival here. This is true for Europe. It is definitely not true for Asia: the report itself includes a table showing that more than half of Asia’s professional immigrants in fiscal year 1966 came here first on temporary student or exchange visas. So did half of our immigrant engineers and scientists from all less developed countries.

The report also understates the student brain drain by faulty statistical analysis; its method of calculating the percentage of such students not returning home has the effect of reducing it by about one fourth. Looking specifically at Asia, the most important case, a fairer method of calculation would show that the 12,077 students who became permanent U.S. residents in the 1962-1966 period were about 28 percent of all those who came.

The Frankel Report, unfortunately, seems so intent on proving that the brain drain is not very serious that the constructive proposals it does make have received little public attention. Our approach should be just the opposite. Rather than hiding from the problem, we should recognize it and make it the focal point for a range of policy actions.

For not only is the brain drain severe. It also illuminates a variety of efforts we can make, working closely with particular developing countries, to reduce the drain on their leadership talent and improve their development prospects.

Immigration restrictions?

One area of possible reform is immigration policy. Unlike many who share my concern about the brain drain, I do not feel we can rule out all forms of immigration restriction in looking for solutions. Freedom of movement is an important value: we built our nation on it. Yet it is no longer an absolute value for us. We apply it selectively — to the Korean doctor, but not the village child whose chance for a healthy life moves here with that physician; to the Indian scientist, but not the peasant who could multiply his income ten times by joining our migrant farm labor force.

“Freedom of movement,” so defined, is certainly a principle more convenient for the gainers than the losers. For today’s “huddled masses” will not find their opportunities here. If they find them at all, it will be at home, because they have creative and resourceful leadership.

So since our immigration policy is now restrictive, consciously shaped in part for our manpower needs, I can see no moral reason not to amend it to take account of the manpower needs of countries whose development is in our national interest. Rather than applying sweeping restrictions to immigration from all poor countries, however, we should provide a framework under which immigration could be limited in specific cases of greatest need. This could be done if Congress authorized the President to negotiate bilateral immigration agreements with whichever developing countries were most affected.

Such agreements might deal particularly with visa conditions for those who come here for avowedly temporary reasons. It might be provided, for example, that some or all foreign students from a particular country be holders of the exchange (“J”) visa, which generally requires a return home for two years before the holder is eligible for immigration.

In addition, bilateral agreements might provide a means of reducing a number of “waivers” of the J-visa return requirement, which our government now provides, on grounds of hardship or national need. Such waiver cases involve less than 5 percent of those here on exchange programs, and we must have some provision for them. But they are numerous in certain fields. About 60 percent of the more than 6000 granted since 1956 were for doctors and nurses. Furthermore, fully 20 percent of all waiver recipients came from a single country, the Philippines, where health conditions are still much worse than our own.

Round-trip tickets

Our primary attack on the brain drain, however, should be positive, aimed at helping talented young people from developing countries to get the right kind of training and put it to effective use back home.

Much can be done in the United States in our treatment of foreign students. Before they arrive, we can work toward a more comprehensive system of overseas selection, through which our colleges and universities can screen applicants from developing countries. Such a system should give preference to those with the best background and ability. But it should focus also on motivation — those most committed to serve their countries — and on field of study — those who would help fill urgent manpower shortages at home.

Once these students enter our institutions, we should aim to make their entire experience relevant to the home situation, by reshaping course programs, by expanding counseling, by promoting regular contacts between students and officials from their countries. For some who must study several years here, it would be an excellent investment to finance one round-trip plane ticket home, to make possible a summer of work experience and renewed contact with their native lands. As students complete their studies here, they should be brought systematically in touch with longterm job opportunities in their countries.

All of these things cost money, and while some of it should come from private sources, our government ought to help finance them — as it does now on a very limited basis. So should the governments of developing countries.

Careers for the talented

However, the most fundamental problems are not in the United States. They are in the poor countries themselves. They are problems of developing the kinds of opportunities and institutions which will attract and retain their best people.

Despite their severe manpower shortages, most developing countries simply don’t provide enough good career opportunities for their top talent. Too often posts are awarded to the less competent because of family ties or ethnic background. Too often ostensibly modern institutions, particularly government and educational bureaucracies, are dominated by narrow men who have risen slowly and are determined that others wait twenty or thirty years for their turns.

Part of the answer is better job placement. Manpower planning is also necessary; countries must make their educational output match the needs of their societies. But the key need is effective manpower utilization, the fullest use of a man’s skills once he is trained, aiming at both his personal development and that of his country.

In other words, there must be more of the kinds of jobs that will attract the creative, resourceful individual who too often migrates through frustration and disillusionment. We must help nations build the kind of institutions — academic, business, governmental — which hire men primarily for what they do, demand that they do it, and advance them as fast as their experience and growth merit. In America this is what we call “freedom of opportunity.” Although we remain riddled with inequalities, the existence of “careers open to talents” has been a key driving force in our progress. If we are serious about development elsewhere, we must help poor countries build such institutions for themselves.

Change will never be as fast as we like. We can do little for countries not committed to self-help. And our influence on developing countries will wither rapidly if Congress continues to hack at aid budgets as it has the past two years.

Nor is the opportunity problem susceptible to frontal attack. In the absence of revolution, many institutions in poor countries are too entrenched and dominated by people with vested interests in the status quo.

But we can help by encouraging and supporting special, sometimes experimental, institutions — academic centers of excellence, research institutes, business enterprises, pilot farm-improvement programs. Many should be on a small scale, both to minimize the opposition of existing “establishments” and to give many men of talent a chance to run their own enterprises and learn from failure or from success.

Ultimately, development of a nation requires a transformation of its opportunity structure just as much as it demands more education, increased capital investment, a sound agricultural base, expanded exports, progress toward national unity, and all the other goals of which experts rightly speak. Like all these others, it is not a change which will come overnight. But if we are to reduce the brain drain and give ourselves and our children a chance for a more peaceful world, we must help poor nations pursue this objective with far more clarity and far more determination than we or they have yet begun to show.