HELP FOR THE BRAIN DRAIN

...A second possibility is to encourage the return of foreign students to their homelands, upon completion of their studies, by recasting the training they get in the United States so that it is specifically relevant for underdeveloped countries and less appropriate for a modern industrial economy...

...Medical personnel constitute about fifty per cent of Latin America's professional loss each year...

...New Jersey, on the other hand, paid $1.83 in Federal taxes for every $1 received...

...In 1966, U.S...

...a study by the Brookings Institution estimates that by 1975 another 50,000 will be needed...

...Imperceptible initially, these migratory currents have only recently become major concerns of policymakers, more of whom are suggesting that pockets of poverty left in their wake be compensated more adequately than heretofore and helped toward productivity through new fiscal policies...

...HELP for the BRAIN DRAIN by WILLIAM C. THIESENHUSEN Economic planners have only recently recognized that the migration of native talent from poorer countries can cancel out even large financial aid and technical assistance from advanced nations...

...The Subcommittee report, released by chairman Henry Reuss, Wisconsin Democrat, disclosed that the annual brain drain of professional and technical workers from all countries to the United States increased fifty-eight per cent during the decade ended in 1966—from 18,995 to 30,039...

...In July, a staff report of the House Research and Technical Programs Subcommittee contended that to the extent the brain drain undermines foreign development, "it also defeats a major U.S...

...They may migrate here either because institutions at home are not able to employ them, because of short-sightedness or lack of funds, or because they are forced out by political problems...

...Coping with the brain drain also demands a step-up of training of needed professionals—especially physicians—in this country to alleviate the temptation of drawing foreigners from their homelands...

...One U.S...

...But in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, resources of talent which we took for granted in Europe remain scarce...

...of all the professions the skills of a physician are among the most inter-culturally transferable...

...medical schools would graduate...

...An Administration inter-agency report last spring reached a similar conclusion...

...This poses an economic and a moral question as our industrial machine and accompanying services expand: As we absorb talent in which other countries have invested, gaining benefits from products developed and services provided by such talent, how can we fairly compensate those countries in a way that will support our claims that we care about their economic and social development...

...The Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs began a study of the brain drain in October...

...They seem to be the ultimate answer...

...Using the same $20,000-per-person figure, Representative Reuss' Subcommittee valued the 1966 migration of 4,390 scientists, engineers, and physicians from poorer countries last year as an $88 million contribution to the United States...

...Material capital has been less important, he believes, than advances of knowledge and farmers' know-how, coupled with the use of new materials which are the products of research done by trained people...

...Likewise, if the developing countries cannot demonstrate that their institutions are attempting to employ professionals to the limit of their resources and in the skills for which they are trained, there is little point to compensation...

...Finally, it demands that more imagination be utilized, both to define the problem with greater precision and to design policies to cope with it...

...Indeed, such compensation by the United States might be earmarked for assisting these countries to improve their domestic training institutions, or even to create needed jobs for professionals...

...If the United States does not expand training programs for doctors, and if doctors do not become more productive by using new medical techniques, the remaining gap can be filled only by foreigners...

...Thus little headway has been made in translating growing concern about the issue into possible strategies to deal with it...

...WILLIAM C. THIESENHUSEN is an assistant professor of agricultural economics in the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin...

...Kelly M. West of the University of Oklahoma, would be approximately $96 million a year—the cost of operating twelve new medical schools, to say nothing of building them...

...He has cited evidence to show that our dependence has increased: In 1951 only nine per cent of our hospital resident doctors were foreign...

...foreign policy objective for the sake of which this country is currently spending about $3.7 billion per year in bilateral and multilateral foreign aid...

...social scientists and government officials have not fully recognized the need for Federal policies to counteract or compensate for the damage which the "brain drain" produces in nations less fortunate than ours...

...by 1964 this proportion had risen to twenty-four per cent...

...Professor Theodore Schultz, University of Chicago economist, contends that the high quality of human resources is the major reason why, between 1945 and the mid-60's, crop production in the United States rose forty-five per cent per acre and farm output per man almost tripled, while cropland declined by about fifteen per cent and the labor force was halved...

...In my opinion, this provides some precedent for foreign aid policies which would offer compensation to poorer countries that have suffered an undeserved loss of talent to this country...

...they lose a much higher percentage of their total stock of physicians through migration than do the developed nations...

...The expense of developing ample facilities to prepare our own citizens to fill our current professional medical void, according to Dr...

...Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma together received about $375 million more in grants and aid than they contributed in taxes...

...In an extensive survey in September, The New York Times reported that there is currently a shortage of about 50,000 physicians in the United States...

...Eventually, countries that regularly gain talent should be required to make contributions to an international fund which might be set up in the United Nations...

...The Reuss Subcommittee decries the absorption of foreign talent by U.S...

...As compensation for this emigrant capital, U.S...

...For every talented person who migrates, the less developed country has lost the benefits of an investment which it would ordinarily amortize over a lifetime of work...

...Unless the United States exerts itself to enlarge the meager pools of talent in poorer areas, rather than drain them, we will face increased hostility from the have-not nations...

...in fiscal 1966 alone it rose forty per cent over 1965...

...Meanwhile, in the past fifteen years the annual output of our medical schools has risen from 6,600 to only 7,600...

...in the hinterlands—since peasant incomes are so low and the government has made few efforts to subsidize professionals who work there—many doctors cannot make a decent living...

...more generally speaking, from low to high wage areas...

...Since we pay for physical product imports from other countries, why not also compensate developing countries for the human capital they send us...

...Although the State Department deserves credit for initiating discussions of the problem, a seminar it held in June, 1966, shrugged off the need for a U.S...

...A team from the President's Office of Science and Technology has been exploring solutions...

...Skilled professionals who migrate to the United States are often products of a highly selective educational system in their own land...

...It appears that our expanding economy has an almost insatiable ability to gobble up skilled people as fast as they are trained...

...Talent migration has occurred from farm to city, from South to North, from mid-continent to both coasts...

...There is evidence that Colombia is not making the efforts she could to retain her physicians...

...brain-drain policy by arguing that the primary locus of the problem —and by inference the primary responsibility for its solution—lies in these poorer countries...

...That this is a serious loss to Colombia is evident: while the United States has one medical doctor for every 770 persons, Colombia has one for every 2,200...

...The National Tax Foundation reported that in fiscal 1966 there were thirty-three states which received as much or more in Federal grants as they paid in Federal taxes...

...He claims that building such facilities would require a $60 million investment and that operating them would cost $15 million a year...

...Government agencies...

...Existing and proposed programs to cope with problems of migration and resultant poverty, then, do not deserve to be thought of in terms of "doles...

...The volume of migration of scientists, engineers, and physicians to the United States from less developed countries is particularly alarming...

...Examples of the medical brain drain are perhaps the most glaring...

...At the same time, the United States has a great capacity to utilize doctors, and we need many more physicians than we train...

...A higher calculation would be more realistic since this figure represents simply the cost of their education and not the potential value of their abilities...

...Such a regressive policy would carry inescapable implications of discrimination and the inefficient use of certain strategic manpower resources...

...Even so, some U.S...

...That we should, in the face of such clear evidence, need doctors from countries where thousands die daily of disease, to relieve our shortage of medical manpower, is inexcusable," Senator Mondale later wrote in the Saturday Review...

...Yet from the viewpoint of the poorer country, each professional who migrates permanently represents a substantial financial loss to his homeland...

...But the brain drain affects many other professions...

...A compensation plan should not constitute our only short-term policy to deal with the brain drain...

...Of the professional categories of Colombians admitted to the United States as immigrants, for instance, the largest single groups in 1963, 1964, and 1965 were physicians and teachers...

...colleges and universities awarded degrees in these fields to about 6,000 students from such countries...

...Professionals may simply succumb to the lure of higher wages in the United States together with such accompanying perquisites as research funds, advanced training possibilities, an intellectual environment, personal security, political stability, and social amenities...

...Senator Walter Mondale, Minnesota Democrat, who has shown increasing concern about the brain drain since his first speech on the matter in the Senate in 1966, has called the present medical situation a "national disgrace...

...Indeed, other criteria may be so compelling that they cancel out any brain drain consideration...

...Compensation also might come in the form of emergency aid to educational institutions in these countries, and, on occasion, as stopgap technical assistance...

...Compensation could help these countries, perhaps in the form of grants designated to create new professional positions or to subsidize existing ones where they are most needed...

...One reason for our insensitivity to the economic cost of talent losses is that, with the success of the Marshall Plan in mind, we often underrate the value of human resources and tend to assume that material capital is the major bottleneck to development, as it was for Europe after World War II...

...Charles Kidd, of the President's Office of Science and Technology, estimates that the annual Latin American out-migration of medical doctors is about equal to the number that three large U.S...

...A third short-run alternative is for the United States and other developed nations to provide indemnities for "imported" manpower resources...

...We may need to accept a slowdown in Federal research and development programs whenever the United States would have to siphon off talent from poorer countries to man them...

...We cannot assuage our consciences with the present package of aid if what we give with one hand we take away with the other...

...Even if the recipient nation has assumed some of the costs of graduate training, the expenses of primary, secondary, and usually undergraduate education have been covered by a poorer country whose training budget is inadequate for its burgeoning population...

...At the same time, the emigration to our shores from all countries of physical and biological scientists, engineers, and biological scientists, engineers, and physicians—which represented about thirty per cent of all professional and technical migration to the United States —increased seventy-seven per cent...

...Accordingly, any loss of their trained professionals means a loss of valuable capital by poorer countries and a setback to their development...

...One finds it hard to justify recruitment in underdeveloped nations by our Government...

...In that same year, 4,390 scientists, engineers, and physicians from these countries migrated to the United States, giving a net gain to the poorer nations of only three in ten...

...The loss of doctors is most critical in the poorer countries...

...Importation of medical skills is much cheaper for us than developing our own facilities...

...Without underplaying the wide array of variables that figure in the development process, economists have recently shown that skill bottlenecks may be just as vital as shortages of capital equipment, and probably will become even more important as development proceeds...

...policy alternative—which almost everyone rejects—is to put up barriers to the movement of skilled and talented persons from less developed countries...

...their case for added assistance by showing how talent loss has thwarted development plans...

...Estimating conservatively that each person costs $20,000 to train, El Mercurio argues that "this meant a contribution from Latin America of $80 million to support the North American economy...

...These trends began' to replace the overriding Nineteenth Century wave of migration from East to West as soon as the frontier closed...

...Rather, since the youngest, most able, and best educated are most likely to migrate after they receive their schooling, richer areas receive a highly selected, often skilled, and, from their standpoint, nearly costless supply of labor and entrepreneurial talent— although they do not always utilize it effectively...

...In postwar Europe skilled managerial and technical personnel who were trained before the war were available...

...Foreign aid compensation to countries which lose out to the brain drain does not suggest that the extent of the brain drain represents the only or even the major yardstick for allocation of foreign assistance...

...Initially, a program of brain drain compensation might originate with economic planners from underdeveloped countries who would put before officials of our Agency for Internatonal Development (A.I.D...

...Recent evidence indicates that the 1967 proportion is nearly thirty per cent...

...At the same time these countries could be encouraged to develop ample and imaginative educational and employment opportunities back home...

...In the past half century internal "brain drains" have occurred in the United States and we have— after a lag, to be sure—responded with some compensation...

...While policy has been slow in coming, the seriousness of the brain drain problem has become steadily more apparent...

...policymakers must begin to consider using some measure of the brain drain as an allocation criterion in deciding how our foreign aid should be apportioned among countries...

...The welfare of the receiving country, the income of emigres, and perhaps even their fields of study are enhanced by the move to a more developed country...

...All such aid, however, should be a net addition to the foreign aid that a country would otherwise receive from the United States...

...Thus, while the functioning of the free market seems to work toward more income concentration, the Government periodically provides some aid to less developed areas of the United States...

...Thus policymakers and researchers, working together, must not only determine more refined measurements for the extent of the brain drain and its irnpact on specific countries but try to ascertain the causes for such losses of talent...

...These changes are being made now—but slowly...

...Direct compensation in cases of brain drain is not an unusual policy suggestion...

...Thus a program could be set in motion so that Great Britain could repay India, or Mexico could indemnify Bolivia, for talent losses...

...When a case can be made that internal political conditions have dfiven talent from the country, there would be little justification for compensatory payments...

...The compensation of source areas thus becomes a proper concern of public policy...

...In Latin America, one of the areas which has felt the recent impact of the brain drain most acutely, Chilean calculations made earlier this year—¦ and reported in Santiago's El Mer-curio—are that from 1960 to 1965 the United States granted immigrant visas for 4,000 university trained professionals...

...This would involve recasting our immigration legislation and possibly returning to a quota system similar to the one which preceded the liberal Immigration Act of 1965...

...While the need is great, professionals tend to "pile up" in the larger cities...

...Paul Miller, Assistant Secretary for Education of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, suggests that at least half of economic growth which is not directly the result of the traditional inputs of capital, land, and labor is due to improvements in educational levels and manpower skills...