Feeling the Direct Effects of Reverse Brain Drain

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with why I've been flooded with actual job-offers (not just interviews) lately:

Tougher US immigration leading to 'reverse brain-drain': study
Wed Aug 22, 12:53 PM ET
The huge backlog in US immigration visas is leading to a "reverse brain-drain" that will force skilled workers to return to their home country, a report released Wednesday concludes.
The study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that more than one million potential immigrants, including scientists, engineers, doctors and researchers, are competing for 120,000 permanent US resident visas each year.
The report said some applicants must wait several years, in part because the number of employment visas issued to immigrants from any single country is fewer than 10,000 per year.
"The United States benefits from having foreign-born innovators create their ideas in this country," said Vivek Wadhwa, a Harvard Law School fellow and co-author of the report.
"Their departures would be detrimental to US economic well-being."
The study by researchers at Duke, New York and Harvard universities is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants' contributions to the US economy.
In this study, "Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain," the researchers concluded that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the United States.
"This imbalance creates the potential for a sizeable reverse brain-drain from the United States to the skilled workers' home countries," the foundation said.
The report said a majority of immigrant company founders, including many in the tech sector, came to the United States as students. Many ended up staying in the United States after graduation, with a number founding new companies.
It said 31 percent of the startups in tech centers had an immigrant key founder, including 52.4 percent in California's Silicon Valley.
The researchers said Indian immigrants founded more companies than those from the next four countries -- Britain, China, Taiwan and Japan -- combined.
They also concluded that foreign nationals living in the United States were inventors or co-inventors in 25.6 percent of international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006.
The total number of applicants and their family members waiting for permanent residence in the United States in 2006 was estimated at 1,055,084. Additionally, there were some 126,421 residents abroad waiting for visas, making a worldwide total of 1,181,505.
"Given that the US comparative advantage in the global economy is in creating knowledge and applying it to business, it behooves the country to consider how we might adjust policies to reduce the immigration backlog, encourage innovative foreign minds to remain in the country, and entice new innovators to come," said Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

Contracting Government Work: Vicarious Liability and Accountability

I'm reprinting this excellent post from Nathan Newman's blog at http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/003707.shtml

July 18, 2006Big Dig Death: Corruption of Privatization
The death last week due to faulty construction in the "Big Dig" construction project in Boston should be seen as a canary in the coal mine of the corruption and even murder due to privatization in this country.

A lot of conservatives might try to blame this on Massachusetts liberals, but the actual management of the project was handed over to the often GOP-allied Bechtel Corp. See this Boston Globe website for a decade plus of stories on privatization problems, but here are some key stories tracing the problem:

1994: Project poses a test for privatization- "Bechtel Corp...is head of a private partnership that will ultimately receive as much as $2 billion in contracts for managing the $7.7 billion Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project...The conflict of interest, critics say, is that Bechtel is overseeing a project that it designed itself. Bechtel, as the lead firm in the joint venture responsible for managing the project, is also responsible for completing up to 40 percent of the engineering design work in some sections."

2004: Big Dig found riddled with leaks- "Engineers hired to investigate the cause of September's massive Big Dig tunnel leak have discovered that the project is riddled with hundreds of leaks that are pouring millions of gallons of water into the $14.6 billion tunnel system. While none of the leaks is as large as the fissure that snarled traffic for miles on Interstate 93 northbound in September, the breaches appear to permeate the subterranean road system, calling into question the quality of construction and managerial oversight provided by Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff on the massive highway project."

But here's my favorite story, which is a story about how the workers on the project knew Bechtel's management was a clusterfuck but were ignored:

2006: Workers doubted ceiling method- "Field tests by construction workers indicated that bolt-and-epoxy fasteners might not support the multi-ton ceiling panels in the Interstate 90 connector tunnel, but the firm that designed the tunnel persuaded Big Dig officials to use the system anyway, law enforcement officials said yesterday...The engineers also said they have discovered documents showing that Bechtel managers were aware that the wall breached this fall was deficient from the moment it was built in the late 1990s, yet did not order it replaced and did not inform state officials of the situation."

READ THAT LAST PARAGRAPH. Bechtel had workers complaining and documents showing that the roof in the tunnels were faulty, yet they covered it up, no doubt because they wanted to save money.

This is what comes from handing management of public projects to private entities with a conflict-of-interest between protecting the public and maximizing their own profits. And of course at the federal level, we've seen the frauds perpetuated by Haliburton and company.

Unfortunately, this kind of privatization is accelerating across the country, not just in construction projects but in handling children in foster care, evaluating health care systems and a range of other public services. But progressives should be focusing on the story of the Big Dig as one more example of why profit-making companies shouldn't be trusted to manage in the public interest.

Posted by Nathan at 10:59 AM

Outsourcing Government Work

Ever since the Big Dig fatalities, I've been critical of the extent that government outsources work to contractors. Today's Washington Post has a relevant take:

Meanwhile, a much quieter revolution was brewing: The federal government outsourced more and more of its functions to private contractors, a shift driven partly by the free-market ideology of the Reagan era and partly by necessity. There were now too many tasks for agencies to do by themselves. As Paul C. Light of New York University has shown, the "federal government" we all know -- the superstructure of agencies and federal employees -- has shrunk while its actual size, including contract and grant employees and projects, is larger than ever.

Here's the rub: Outsourcing eliminates incentives to perform well and shields contractors from accountability.

From The Can't-Do Nation.

Link to Paul C. Light's work:
http://www.brookings.edu/gs/cps/light20030905.htm
and
http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815752652/html/index.html