We need to keep the smart people here

Thomas Friedman is making so much sense it's surprising:

Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

That is no surprise. After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”...

What is worrisome about America today is the combination of cutbacks in higher education, restrictions on immigration and a toxic public space that dissuades talented people from going into government. Together, all of these trends are slowly eating away at our differentiated edge in attracting and enabling the world’s biggest mass of smart, creative risk-takers.

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-I.Q. risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, “we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-I.Q. risk-takers, said Mundie. “If we don’t have that competitive edge, our standard of living will eventually revert to the global mean.”

Right now we have thousands of foreign students in America and one million engineers, scientists and other highly skilled workers here on H-1B temporary visas, which require them to return home when the visas expire. That’s nuts. “We ought to have a ‘job-creators visa’ for people already here,” said Litan. “And once you’ve hired, say, 5 or 10 American nonfamily members, you should get a green card.”

Strategy for national success:

Step 1: Get the smart people.

Step 2: Keep the smart people.

Our universities and tech companies are doing a good job at Step 1, but we as a country are doing an increasingly bad job at Step 2. I have no idea why we are doing a bad job at Step 2, actually, since getting and keeping more smart people seems to be something that both liberals and conservatives would want to do. We're just asleep at the wheel.

Think about this: our rivals for technological supremacy* last century included Germany, Russia, and Japan. None of those countries had a snowball's chance in Heck against us, because those are strongly ethnic-nationalist countries whose core values restricted the supply of immigrants. All three of those countries were great at training lots of highly skilled scientists and engineers, but we could get even more at a fraction of the cost just by letting them move here. In fact, a large number of our best scientists and engineers last century were German and Russian immigrants!

This century, our rivals for technological supremacy will be China and India. These countries are much, much bigger than Germany, Russia, and Japan, and have decent education systems. But as of right now, the brightest people in those two countries mostly want to move to the United States of America. Why don't we let them? Why don't we encourage them?

* Yes, I know that technology is not a competition, and benefits everyone. Rivalry, however, is useful in both college football and technology for inspiring organizations to try really hard to do well.