The Global Competition for Scientists
As innovation accelerates, countries are racing to claim as much scientific talent as possible.
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In this week’s newsletter we discuss the scientists that make scientific breakthroughs possible. More precisely, we’ll talk about the global competition over scientific talent that’s emerging as countries realise the ample scientific opportunities available now. We start by discussing why science has historically thrived in those places where talent from all over the world is welcome, and see what countries today are doing (or not doing!) to try lure the brightest to their shores.
As we turn into 2022, it’s becoming clear that the 2020s are going to be an incredibly exciting time for science and technology. Just two years into the decade and we’ve already seen incredible results, such as mRNA vaccines produced in record time. In many cases, the gold rush of new discoveries in one area has also helped progress in a completely different area, creating a virtuous cycle. Think of novel AI methods which let us unlock new insights from the treasure trove of genetic data we now have thanks to the revolution in gene sequencing. As revolutions build on each other, science is set to blossom in the coming years.
However, this progress didn’t drop out of the vacuum. It is the result of grueling hard work by armies of researchers. With the pace of discovery now accelerating, scientific talent in these booming fields will be at an increasing premium, and science in the 2020s will be marked by an increasingly global tug-of-war over scientific talent.
Science and Foreign Talent
Science is always a global project. Scientific discovery is fueled by an environment where different ideas from all over the world are free to engage with each other. This is why historically, science has flourished wherever scholars from all over are able to collaborate with and challenge each other. This was true in both the Islamic Golden Age of a thousand years ago and the European Renaissance of five hundred years ago.
At the start of the 20th century, the US was a scientific backwater yet by the end it was the undisputed powerhouse of innovation. The key reason behind this amazing transformation was the arrival of foreign talent fleeing Europe before and during WWII. Now flush with the world’s brightest, the US produced incredible innovation. The Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, relied on legendary scientists like the Italian Enrico Fermi and Hungarian Leo Szilard. At the very end of WWII, Operation Paperclip was launched to stealthily transfer 1600 German scientists to the US.1 One of these was Wernher von Braun, who would eventually be the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that launched American astronauts to the moon in 1969.
Historical anecdotes are one thing, but now we have quantitative proof of the positive impact of foreign talent on US innovation. Moser et al. (2011) showed that chemists fleeing Nazi Germany increased patents by almost a third in the fields they worked in. Akcigit et al. (2017) also studied US patent data and concluded that fields which had more immigrants between 1880 and 1940 produced more patents and citations between 1940 and 2000.
The Picture Today
Clearly, the ability to attract the world’s best talent is a huge boost for scientific output. So what does the global competition for talent look like in the 21st century?
Let’s start with the US, which came into the 21st century riding on the back of its scientific success during the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, America became the obvious destination for science. The scale of opportunities and facilities available were unmatched. On a personal note, this was the reason why I also came. I still can’t believe I got the chance to do research in the same labs where Nobel laureates once discovered new particles!
However, in recent years America’s relative advantage has waned. A recent report by the Department of Energy warned that the US is “falling behind” in basic sciences. One of the key reasons for the relative decline is the tougher global competition for talent. As other countries catch up, the US is slowly losing its special status as the premier scientific destination for the world, and seeing a corresponding sharp decline in skilled immigration.
Despite trumpeting its “strategic competition” with China, the US today seems to have little desire to provide incentives to attract scientific talent. As opposed to simple points-based systems used by other countries, the American immigration system hinges on a byzantine application process that feels more like the lottery of college admissions essays. This comes with de facto country quotas. Although well intentioned, these result in years long backlogs which essentially penalise high skilled immigrants for being from India or China. The Cato Institute estimated that the expected waiting time for Indians with an advanced degree to get their green cards is 150 years. For those applying in the “extraordinary ability”, the highest skill category, it is “only” 6 years. This dysfunction is often the main reason that US trained STEM talent opts to leave.
The helplessness of the US to fix its skilled immigration pipeline today is in stark contrast to its attitude a century ago - it’s difficult to imagine America undertaking anything like an Operation Paperclip today.
So what about the US’s main rival China? In contrast to the US, which seems to be on autopilot, the Chinese are actively taking steps to bolster their talent pool. One of their most successful initiatives is the Thousand Talents Program. This program initially focused on luring ethnic Chinese scientists trained in Western countries back to China with attractive salaries and research funding. Soon eligibility was expanded to foreign nationals also. Today, the scheme is open to any Chinese scientist under 55 and foreign scientist under 65 who has the research record to secure a job at a Chinese institution. With this influx of foreign talent, Chinese science and innovation has accordingly risen with patent applications more than tripling in the decade after it was introduced.
Thousand Talents has been great at attracting scientists, but it is not as successful as retaining them. Instead of relocating full-time to China, many researchers prefer only a part time commitment and opt to retain their tenured positions at Western universities. One reason for this might be the difficulty of having a free exchange of ideas. Ample funding is no use if academics cannot freely ask and answer the questions they are interested in. When it comes to talent retention, China has an acute disadvantage vs the US which, despite its dysfunctional immigration policies, is very successful at retaining foreign talent once it is allowed to enter and stay in the first place. In 2019, 90% of Chinese STEM PhD recipients from US universities were still in the US 10 years after their degree. That number was 72% across all foreign STEM doctorates.
Chinese leaders are very aware of this, and fear that it could lose many scientific discoveries and breakthroughs to the US if it reforms its STEM immigration pipeline.
Given this, expect the Chinese to keep iterating on new programs to attract and retain scientific talent over the decade.
It’s not just China and the US - countries all over the world are courting scientific talent. In 2020, the UK launched the Global Talent Visa which is designed primarily to attract scientific and academic talent and is valid for up to 5 years. Canada’s ambitious immigration plans for 2021-23 aim to grant around 400,000 permanent residencies yearly, with scientific occupations featuring prominently in the list of skilled occupations that get around 200,000 of those slots. Smaller countries are getting involved also. For example, Taiwan launched its Gold Card scheme in 2018 and the UAE its Golden Visa one in 2019 to attract scientific and entrepreneurial talent.
Unlike the US’s confused college essay inspired and quota backlogged process, almost all of these alternatives offer a straightforward applications tied to previous employment, quick processing time, and a clear timeline to residency/citizenship. However, in many cases these other countries cannot provide scientific infrastructure on a similar scale as the US and China, which will dampen the effectiveness of their schemes until scientific investment can reach comparable levels.
There are already clear signs that the 2020s will be a great time for science. As the pace of breakthroughs accelerates, so will demand for the talent that makes them happen. Since the end of the Cold War, the US was the obvious destination for any scientist, but this has changed as others have caught up in recent years - the global scientific arena is slowly opening up. China is the obvious challenger, and while it has been successful in attracting talent with programs like Thousand Talents, it hasn’t been as successful at retaining it. This has created space for countries all over the world such as the UK, Canada, Taiwan, and the UAE to throw their hat into the ring. While scientific discoveries will be centre stage in the coming years, the backstage will be marked by this quietly intense global tug-of-war over the scientific talent that makes the breakthroughs possible.
The Soviets also did this, launching Operation Osoaviakhim in 1946 to transfer 2200 scientists from Germany to the Soviet Union.