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.
The rejection rate for H-1B visas, which allow professionals who are not U.S. citizens to work in the country for up to six years, increased from 9.5% to 17.8% between 2001 and 2003. And that's with the overall number of people who are applying for visas down sharply in the wake of Sept. 11. Some 6.3 million people applied for U.S. visas betweent Oct. 2000 and September 2001. But in fiscal 2003, that number fell by more than 40% to 3.7 million, according to a recent New York Times article.
Florida convincingly argues that terrorism is less a threat to the U.S. than the possibility that creative and talented people, like Brin and Khosla and Wang, will stop wanting to live within its borders. What do you think?
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, innovation + creativity, United States, Richard Florida, India, Moscow, Sun Microsystems Inc. |
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Recent Comments | 3 Total
October 11, 2004 at 2:08pm by Dominic Muren
Absolutely. We've been teetering on the edge of the problem that inevitably comes to protectionist countries; we start to spend so much time building walls to protect our assets that we forget to create any in the first place. Industrial and product design are facing some of the same issues - The fact that manufacturing took place in the east was fine with us, as long as we produced all the designs. But now, with all the manufacturing so close, Singapore and Malaysia are becoming real hotbeds for design, and are even garnering outsourcing jobs from the US.
Me personally, I'm fine with playing the global game, so I'm trying to learn what it takes to make and sell things around the world, rather than only the US market. But there's no way that everyone will be able to make the change as fast as the market is changing: If we can't find some solution, there are going to be a lot of designers watching their jobs go overseas.
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Ignite Your Creativity at www.idfuel.com
October 11, 2004 at 3:37pm by raghu
I guess its a direct result of an expanding global economy. you can't just send work overseas and not expect people to learn from it and design there own.
The larger problem of US not getting new talent from overseas to sustain its talent pool is partly to be balmed on the shortsightness of the american people, there are hardly any people in the US who know where Bangalore is on the world map.
By having a US only focus americans are alieniating themselves from a lot of people and this is very evident in there foreign policies and how they are dealing with immigrant work population.
The point at which poeple turn back to there home countries to give wings to there ideas is very near, the last standing hope in my view is the universities and they too are not doing much as of today to stop it.
October 11, 2004 at 3:59pm by Mark Zorro
America was built on migration and so long as it propagates the principle of “easy come, easy go” where is the real foothold of creativity? What is creativity if it no longer has roots and the growth from those roots has no meaning?
The world does not stop rotating because there isn't a Google or there isn't a Sun Microsystem or there isn't a Wang Labs, it will always rotate but it will be better off if it retains fertile soil for pioneering minds. The path from sperm to creative individual isn't at all important as the fertile nature of it and the long term value of its resulting economics. Can America retain its economic fertility? This is the really important question because wherever the richest pastures are, will go the seekers of fortune, the seekers of a new tomorrow, the world traditionally migrates to where wealth has a chance to grow not yesterdays news or yesterdays empires.
Economics and tribalism has always had the upper hand as a global map changer but now intelligence is on the verge of entirely deconstructing and reconstructing our notions of boundaries, the boundaries themselves are not disappearing rather the boundaries are reshaping in ways that clearly the best thinkers out their find very difficult to grasp - it isn't the talent that changes the map of the world, it is the opportunity - if opportunity becomes ubiquitous in the globe, then America has some serious thinking to do - but how does a nation so enamored by short term thinking switch to concepts it thinks are dying i.e. the imminent return of loyalty and a world fit for long term thinkers?
Don’t worry for now because Brin and Khosla love America. Don’t worry for now because America is the single most powerful construct on the Earth, albeit so long as it does not incur a global Power of Sale (but then whatever destroys America destroys the rest of the world too, the domino still starts with America, it is only when America is an isolated domino that it will truly will have reason to worry). As for An Wang even though he was born in China, he is an American through and through – but maybe the USA’s greatest path of destiny is to organize for the children of Brin and Khosla rather than take notes at the graveside of Wang. Learning Chinese won’t help, what will the concept of migration matter to nations who already have enough people and are held together by cultures deeper than a 30 second advert or a 30 minute reality show. Migration should matter to nations who don’t have sufficient scale of customers ready and prepared for a forthcoming global-size economy – a billion is adequate scale, scientific and technical progress will take care of the sustainability question. The reason I can see this is because I don’t have my eyesight locked in a zillion fee-based reports, in details that educate rather than redefine and in facts that become brick walls of logical reason – all of this blinds people from the real issue – opportunity and the future nature of customer.
M.