Free Republic

As NASA prepares to launch its last space shuttle — ending 30 years in which large teams of creative scientists and engineers sent winged spaceships into orbit — it is facing what may be a bigger challenge: a brain drain that threatens to undermine safety as well as the agency’s plans. Space experts say the best and brightest often head for the doors when rocket lines get marked for extinction, dampening morale and creating hidden threats. They call it the “Team B” effect. “The good guys see the end coming and leave,” said Albert D. Wheelon, a former aerospace executive...

The designer of the Russian Bulava SLBM (Sea Launched Ballistic Missile), Yury Solomonov, has gone public with his views on the many test failures of the missile. Solomonov believes that the basic design of the missile is sound, but problems with suppliers and the work force have created many problems. The collapse of the Soviet defense industries, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, made it difficult to get all the components needed for the Bulava. And many of the items obtained were of poor quality. When the Soviet defense manufacturing organizations disappeared (because orders fell over 80 percent...

Travelers from 14 countries that have been home to terrorists will no longer automatically face extra screening before they fly to the U.S. Beginning this month, anyone traveling to the U.S. will instead be screened based on specific information about potential terrorist threats, a senior Obama administration official said. A person would be stopped if he or she matches a description, even if officials do not have a suspect's name, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues. For example, if the U.S. has intelligence about a Nigerian man between the ages of...

If Millennials realize they're going to have to pay the fiscal price for baby boomers' sins, they might choose to leave the US for more financially friendly locations. BY TIM KANE What if they had a fiscal crisis, and nobody came? What if the chump generation figures out the Ponzi scheme? Bob Samuelson thinks the fallout will be political: ... As baby boomers retire, higher federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may boost Millennials' taxes and squeeze other government programs. It will be harder to start and raise families. Millennials [ages 30 and younger] could become the chump...

For all the good that the G-20 Summit did for Pittsburgh's national image, the city's proposed tuition tax on local college students might as well be another big belch of steel mill smoke hiding Southwestern Pennsylvania from world view. The so-called "Fair Share Tax" will, according Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, help raise money needed to pay pensions for retired city employees. But while Pittsburgh does need to make good on the promise made to public employees in the past, the proposed 1% tuition tax tacked onto the substantial financial burden college students already carry won't help. At best, the revenue...

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami...

The turning point for Stephan Jung came in February, around the time bonus checks were slashed. A veteran of UBS, one of many banks tarnished by the financial crisis, Mr. Jung realized that the old Wall Street would not be bouncing back any time soon. It was time to head for the new. “After 10 years, I did not see a future for myself,” said Mr. Jung, 42, who quit to parlay his sales expertise into a career at Aladdin Capital, a small but rising investment firm run by others who had also left some of the most venerable names...

Gov. Jennifer Granholm is planning to host a public forum next week to discuss the how to stem the tide that leads nearly half of the Michigan’s college students to seek professional opportunities outside the state within a year of graduating. Granholm wants to reverse that trend and minimize the effects of Michigan’s brain drain, something The Detroit News recently documented in a two-day series. The number of Michigan State University graduates leaving the state increased from 24 percent in 2001 to 49 percent, according to a school study. Fifty-three percent of graduates of the University of Michigan who are...

The Federal Aviation Administration. The Social Security Administration. The National Science Foundation. The Treasury Department. All could lose as much as a quarter of their employees by 2012, mostly because of retirements. They are not alone. Across the government, about a third of full-time employees will retire in the next five years, according to estimates prepared by the Office of Personnel Management. The turnover could be even higher in the ranks of federal executives and supervisors. From the start of the Bush administration, agencies have been preparing for the churning that will be caused by the baby boom retirement wave....

Aerospace and Defense Sector Braces for Potential Brain Drain As Cold War Workers Retire WASHINGTON (AP) -- The aerospace and defense sector is bracing for a potential brain drain over the next decade as a generation of Cold War scientists and engineers hits retirement age and not enough qualified young Americans seek to take their place. ADVERTISEMENT The problem -- almost 60 percent of U.S. aerospace workers in 2007 were 45 or older -- could affect national security and even close the door on commercial products that start out as military technology, industry officials said. While U.S. universities are awarding...

Changing blog language to something except your mother tongue, reminds me the Iranian Brain-Drain, as its about two months that I’ve changed my blog language from Persian to English! The Brain-Drain is not always physically by going abroad, sometimes can occur by changing your writing language. If you suffer from internet censorship and want to have freedom of speech, there’s no obligation to write in your language and better to escape as fast as you can from this sad situation. No one should feel regret or put himself in difficulty when you understand what did Ayatollah Khomeini the leader of...

The US is facing the prospect of a massive reverse brain drain with an estimated backlog of 1 million highly skilled legal immigrants in the queue for LPR (Legal Permanent Resident) status, against a total yearly allotment of just over 120,000 visas. At least 30 per cent of those in the immigration limbo are estimated to be Indians. A new report released on Wednesday, which is the third part of a study titled 'Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain - America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs', concludes that many highly skilled visa applicants waiting in the green card-queue for...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - 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...

Thousands of Canadian-trained doctors ply their trade in the U.S., study finds Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press via Canada.com, Monday, April 09, 2007 TORONTO -- One in nine trained-in-Canada doctors is practising medicine in the United States, says a study published in Tuesday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. If Canadian-educated doctors who were born in the U.S. are excluded, the number is one in 12 - and the study suggests that luring back some of these Canadian physicians would go a long way towards solving the country’s doctor shortage. While they admit the exodus has abated a...

....Rather than seeing self-esteem as something that flows from good performance, they made self-esteem the first priority, assuming that good performance would flow from an inflated level of self-satisfaction. It's like those no-score ball games. The goal is good feelings. Everyone plays, no one loses, every kid gets a trophy. It's like the teachers' contracts --- no scorecard, no linking of pay hikes to performance, everyone's a winner. It's a mind-set that sees score-keeping as too judgmental, too oppressive, too capitalist, too likely to deliver inequality and injured self-images, whether it's with pay or on the ball field....

As Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez further tightens control of the South American country's economy, wealthy Venezuelans who once thought they could live with his socialist edicts are turning to their backup plan - flight to the United States, particularly Florida. Venezuelans have long gobbled up condos and pre-construction deals in Florida as investments, but the latest buyers want homes where they can live and business properties that will help them earn a green card. "First the people who come are the businessmen in the highest circles, then the losing politicians, then the military and then the professionals," said Miami-based immigration...

Middle classes escape from Chavez socialism By Jose Orozco in Caracas, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 1:31am GMT 11/02/2007 Middle-class Venezuelans are queuing to leave the country amid fears that its president, Hugo Chavez, is laying the ground for a dictatorship. Hugo Chavez said that he intended to nationalise the telecommunications and electricity industries Opponents of his "20th century socialism" are so desperate to escape that they have resorted to learning new languages and tracking down long lost European relatives in the hope of securing a visa. At the US Embassy, visa enquiries have almost doubled in recent weeks, from 400...

California growing more slowly High cost of living seen as dampening its appeal Tyche hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, December 21, 2006 California's population growth rate slipped for a sixth year in a row as tens of thousands of residents left for other states, according to new estimates the state released Wednesday. Demographers said many of those who left probably were seeking a lower cost of living. New arrivals from other countries and babies born in California more than offset the departure of residents for other states, bringing California to an estimated total population of 37.4 million on July 1....

NEW ORLEANS - It wasn't the flooding that drove Dr. David Jones out of New Orleans for good. His house in the Lakeview neighborhood stayed dry. Instead, it was the way Hurricane Katrina eroded the orthopedic surgeon's practice. With fewer patients to treat and no patience for the sluggish pace of the city's recovery, he moved his family and practice to Raleigh, N.C., in July. "I love New Orleans and always will," said Jones, 39, who now works at a hospital affiliated with Duke University. "I could have made a go of it there, but it would have been slow...

A generation gone south National Post Monday, November 20, 2006 Byline: Lorne Gunter Remember the brain drain? In the late 1990s and early part of this decade, it was a hot topic for commentators and opposition politicians. Tens of thousands of skilled Canadians were leaving each year for the United States. According to all of the fables Canadians have been fed since the Trudeau era, it shouldn't have been happening. The U.S. was dark territory, Canada the peaceable kingdom. America was rife with racism, poverty, crime, gun violence and homelessness. If you got sick there, and were uninsured, you...

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Some nations face a severe brain drain in the coming decades as a direct result of the European Union's policy to increase student mobility, experts have warned. Emerging Eastern European countries in particular are being hit by the exodus of top students choosing Britain as their ideal destination for higher education, they add. Britain is emerging as their top destination for students from across Europe. These young migrants are not heading to the UK for a gap year, but to study full time in British colleges and universities. But the flow of students that leave home...

MOSCOW: Andrei Aleyev is just the kind of promising young scientist that President Vladimir Putin says he wants to persuade to stay in Russia. So, thanks to Putin, his salary will rise over the next four years ... by $200. Already earning $800 a month at his prestigious nuclear physics lab, 22-year-old Aleyev is doing well by Russian standards. But that means he will see little difference when Putin's policy on stopping the country's brain drain takes effect, with $1,000 salaries being phased in for the best researchers between 2006 and 2010. While many impoverished scientists here would dream of...

BANGALORE, India (UPI) -- India`s booming economy has set off a reverse brain drain, encouraging talented Indians trained in the West to return home to lucrative executive jobs. These jobs are being offered by Western companies setting up operations in India and letting their Indian employees manage them. Top Indian companies also are contributing to the reverse brain drain with offers of attractive jobs. No where in India is this trend more evident than in Bangalore, home of the country`s information technology industry, which triggered explosive growth in recent years. The gated community of Palm Meadows in Bangalore`s Whitefield suburbs,...

France’s Brain Drain November 9th, 2005 Writing recently in The Telegraph, columnist Mark Steyn noted that the ongoing riots in France and neighboring countries are likely to exacerbate Europe’s demographic woes. “Europe could face a continent-wide version of the ‘white flight’ phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them,” Steyn said. Those especially likely to leave include France’s 160,000 scientists, who have long been frustrated by the difficulties of doing research in their native country. In France the majority of scientists work for government-financed...

The Canadian brain drain to the U.S. used to be only a spit in the bucket for most of the twentieth century. It became a steady drizzle in the eighties, rain in the nineties and can be best described as coming down in buckets today. And so, according to the article on page A4 of today's National Post, Canada is now ready to start scouting in other countries to replace the brains we lose to the United States. This is all fine and dandy except it won't work! You see, even if Canada is successful in recruiting brains, what's stopping...

In Iran, a PhD means... Pizza Hut Delivery work Tue May 31, 2:28 AM ET TEHRAN (AFP) - The United States may see oil and terrorism as Islamic Iran's main exports, but many young people here will be quick to disagree. The Islamic republic, home to some of the most qualified young people in the Middle East, has been exporting its brain-power at an alarming rate -- with an estimated 150,000 frustrated graduates taking flight every year. And as a joke going around Iranian universities puts it, having a PhD means you're more than likely to head overseas for a...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

The tide is turning. A recent US report warned that the challenge for science and technology in America is that even if it does everything right, the world (read India, China) poses unprecedented competitive challenges. Ten years ago, such a report would have been scoffed at. Not any longer. More and more Indian techies, scientists, doctors are homeward bound, giving up high-paying jobs abroad and joining R&D units, hospitals, government institutions or even their alma mater here. America's brain drain is becoming India's brain gain. "It's a really exciting time to be here," declares Kunal Bajaj, project consultant with Telecom...

CHENNAI: Concerned over the shortage of specialised doctors, India may revive a 25-year-old law to prevent them from leaving the country. "There was legislation 25 years ago which banned the outflow of doctors in specialties like cardiology, neurology and anaesthesia" and this could be revived "if the need arose", Health Minister R. Anbumani said Monday night. "They were not allowed to go abroad. If the need to restrict their outflow from the country is urgently felt, we will discuss the matter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and see what can be done about it," he told reporters on the sidelines...

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in their homeland. Philippe Goldenstein, 39, once a bodyguard for France's Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, doesn't scare easily. So when his yarmulke drew hostility on the streets of his native Paris, where anti-Semitic attacks are escalating, he fought back. ''One Arab on his bicycle called me a dirty Jew,'' he said. ``I had to beat him up.'' But like many French Jews who have settled in South Florida recently, Goldenstein and his wife, Katia, began to fear for their children, now 2 and 3 years old. ''Since the intifada started [in 2002], things are degrading...

If you had to go by the headlines, you'd be forgiven for concluding that the Old World's best and brightest all look down on an intellectually inferior America. But the truth seems to be that Europe's brightest minds are concluding that the U.S. is the place to be -- at least when it comes to the sciences. Plainly it's something that worries official Europe, which explains a recent conference in Paris dedicated to the subject. According to a European Commission survey, more than 70% of the EU-born recipients of U.S. doctorates between 1991 and 2000 planned to stay in America....

Snigdha Dhar sat in the echoing emptiness of her new home, her husband off at work, her 7-year-old son prattling on about Pizza Hut. The weather outside was California balmy. Children rode bicycles on wide smooth streets. Construction workers toiled on villas like hers - white paint, red roofs, green lawns - and the community center's three pools. Six years ago, Dhar and her husband, Subhash, a vice president at Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant, migrated like thousands of Indians before them to Silicon Valley in California and its suburban good life. But Silicon Valley is not where their...

In recent years, young Iranian university graduates have been immigrating to developed countries in droves. Some experts consider the brain drain phenomenon a prevailing tendency among the youth, believing that it is difficult to prevent this tendency. This trend imparts positive and negative messages to society. The negative message is that there is a problem in retaining educated people, while scientific exchanges are a positive point of the phenomenon. Scholars residing in developed countries could help their own countries by making connections for scientific exchanges. Ideally, efforts should be made to encourage educated Iranian expatriates to return in order to...

Iran has the highest rate of "brain drain" in the world. That's the conclusion of the International Monetary Fund, which recently surveyed some 61 countries. The IMF says every year more than 150,000 educated Iranians leave their home country in the hope of finding a better life abroad. RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari spoke to young people who have chosen to leave Iran and experts to see what is driving the country's future to find opportunity somewhere else. Prague, 8 May 2004 (RFE/RL) -- Vahid Garousi emigrated to Canada about three years ago, after graduating in computer engineering from one of...

Iran's top export: oil, carpets and brains By Fereshteh Modarresi - TEHRAN When 23-year-old Bahareh graduated in engineering from Tehran university she headed straight for the Canadian embassy, making what has become an all too common step for Iran's educated youth. "As a mechanical engineer, it's too difficult to find a job. And as a woman, it's next to impossible," she explained. "On top of that I want more freedom, so really I have no other choice." According to the various figures available on Iran's brain drain, up to 180,000 young Iranians - many of them armed with some of...

Brain Drain Hurting Germany These Frankfurt students haven't left Germany - yet Germany's brightest and best qualified young professionals are leaving the country in droves and securing lucrative positions abroad. Educators are converging on Cologne for Europe's largest education and training trade fair, which opened Monday. While German participants familiarize themselves with new methods, theories and teaching aids, the fruits of their labors continue to abandon ship. After investing tens of thousands in education and training costs, Germany is losing its best qualified professionals to better paid positions elsewhere, economists complain. And the growing brain drain is compounding Germany's economic...

January 19, 2004 | Vol. 163 No. 3 How To Plug Europe's Brain Drain Europe's best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. — and billions of euros and thousands of jobs are at stake. Here's how Europe is trying to lure them back BY JEFF CHU When Valerio Dorrello looks around his lab, he sees a miniature European Union. As the afternoon sun streams in, the Italian postdoctoral fellow stands at his sink, changing solutions for one of his experiments. A Spanish colleague, Virginia Amador, pours a gel between glass plates, while a German researcher...

By Stuart Silverstein LOS ANGELES TIMES (Oops...this is why I excerpted the article) BERKELEY - Here he was, a top physics researcher in a basement lab, where flooding, power failures and minute building vibrations were damaging his long-term experiments. [. . .] Then Cornell offered him new quarters and equipment worth up to $4 million. So last year, Davis left Berkeley, where he had taught and completed all of his graduate studies -- the place he had considered "one of the best physics institutions in the world." Once the envy of academia, UC Berkeley's physics department is suffering from what...

Speaking at U of Arkansas

When IT specialist Jim Mangi decided to help form a union at IBM in 1999 after the company changed its pension plan, the worst part was telling his father, a Big Blue retiree. "What's he going to think? What's he going to say to his son ... who is going to start union organizing?" Mangi recalls. But as it turned out, his father was all for it. "He knows it's just not what it was," says Mangi, secretary of Alliance@IBM, which is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Many high-tech workers are feeling under siege, and Mangi is...

  Future of the IT Worker U.S. companies are increasingly sending IT work overseas to save on labor costs, creating a grim outlook for today's IT professional. Read all parts of this special feature package:Exporting IT JobsThe New IT Worker: Angry and ProactiveThere's More to Consider Than Cheaper LaborSurviving Offshore CutbacksInternational BacklashSaving jobs, raising costsSalary comparisonBank's IT Workers Threaten Strike Over Outsourcing DealSurviving a Sea Change The writing is on the wall. If you are a programmer or an application developer, or work on the IT help desk or in data center operations, your IT job is in jeopardy,...

Arab brain drain destabilizes Mideast, poses threat to West SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMSunday, March 16, 2003 The Arab world continues to be hurt as its best and brightest university-educated men emigrate to Western Europe and the United States. U.S. analysts said the brain drain, combined with a rising unemployment rate among young Arabs, threatens the stability of the Middle East. The high emigration rate of young Arabs also creates ghettos of frustrated Muslims in the West that serve as pools for Al Qaida recruitment, Middle East Newsline reported. The issue was discussed at a seminar on March 3 hosted...

<p>CAPE TOWN - When the Greater Cape Town morgue started looking for a new superintendent in 2000, police Captain Ricardo Schouten was convinced he would get the job. A medically trained officer skilled in autopsies, he had already been acting superintendent for three years.</p>