By “skilled immigrants” I mean people with advance degrees (PhD, MD, …) holding all types of highly technical and managerial positions.
Asking this because skilled immigrants, at least in theory:
- knows, and has first-hand experience of how much bullshit one has to go through to immigrate,
- has enough bargaining power to move to another immigration-friendly country,
- let’s just say that the upcoming US policies don’t seem to be friendly to any immigrants at all…
But then US tech and research are supported largely by the same skilled immigrants. So I’m curious how that is supposed to play out…
Sorry this is a bit of a strange question.
P.S.: I’m… not asking for a friend. I’ve been constantly worried for the past two weeks; I try not to rush to conclusions, so the fact that I’m still worried concerns me. Double quotation marks because in the US it’s literally the same government agency that manages all immigrants no matter how they got in the country (highly skilled worker, family of citizen, asylum, literally just crossed the border, …)
NPR was literally talking about this earlier in the morning, specifically within academia. I forget the speaker, but they cited that after Brexit, neighboring countries saw a rise in quality researchers who opted not to stay or study in the UK.
Honestly, even 2016 gives us some insight though and if I recall correctly, it never really caused significant brain drain. A little hard to measure people who never were here to begin with, but even my wife mentioned her reason for staying after the election and it’s because there’s still money to be made here.