Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

I don't think it follows that preventing that brain drain would have lead to appreciably better outcomes for those countries. The real sucking factor for the united states is the second to none availability of capital to spend on R & D. If you keep the brains where they were raised, there is no mechanism for them to actually turn their ideas into fruition because there is little funding to support this either in private or public sector. The reason why you hear about research talent going back to China is because they are offered PI positions and generous startup grants or something analogous in most cases, with the government there committed to invest billions in research. You can't really expect that in the global south. You can't even really expect that in Europe in a lot of cases.

> If you keep the brains where they were raised, there is no mechanism for them to actually turn their ideas into fruition because there is little funding to support this either in private or public sector.

In such a world, why wouldn't you see 1. foreign R&D companies, 2. indexed into a thriving foreign equities market, 3. gathering the interest of domestic investors who want to diversify beyond domestic investments, by 4. moving their money and/or investing in domestic proxy investments?

I say this as a Canadian whose managed mutual-fund holdings are apparently largely composed of foreign (mostly American) proxy equities — and who has met many Canadian-based VCs who don't do much investment into Canadian companies. If not for talent immigration, the American investment landscape would probably look similar!

If you're a US investor, investing in US R&D is easy, you have a good idea of how things work and how to get justice if you're defrauded.

If you want to invest in another country, that's a big change. There's certainly opportunity there, but without knowledge and contacts, it can be very hard to get things done.

One track to investing in foreign R&D is foreign nationals come and work in the US to earn skills, knowledge, and capital, and then they take those earnings and invest them in their country of origin, maybe living here or there.

The U.S. is where the money is. In canada between public and private sector about 30 billion dollars are spent on research and development. Across the entire EU, this figure is more like 440 billion dollars. In the U.S., the figure is 885 billion dollars.

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/publicrandd-aspx/

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246

> I don't think it follows that preventing that brain drain would have lead to appreciably better outcomes for those countries.

Well sure, it depends what the counterfactual is. If those countries just physically prevented the people from leaving, and nothing more, I wouldn't expect that countries' outcomes to improve. But what the countries suffering from brain drain presumably want is for there to be attractive opportunities for those skilled workers in their own country.

My point was that in this alternate hypothetical world, there likely wouldn't be the large number of US domestic R&D companies to serve as valid targets for such investment, as many of the clever people who start them or staff them wouldn't live in the US. Those people would instead be starting and staffing those companies wherever they did live — or in whatever country they could immigrate to instead of the US, with that country then supplanting the US's role as a global R&D center. Which would put American investors in the same position that other countries' investors are in: having money, but few domestic R&D companies that aren't already plump with cash, while most opportunities are foreign.

(Or, if we really lean into the "alternate history" bit, then the US might not have so many rich investors to begin with, as those investors would have been the ones living in that other global R&D center country, who became ludicrously wealthy when their investments into the domestic R&D companies in that other country bore fruit.)

Yes, I know; but we're talking about what would happen in a hypothetical world where US R&D innovation mostly stops happening, not for lack of money, but for lack of talent; so US investors no longer have any interesting domestic options that are likely to bear any fruit at any multiplier they'd be interested in.

Sure, investors could just park their money in what few dumb domestic options there are. That's the "patriotic" approach, and in less-aggressive markets, you'll see some investors [esp. big institutional investors] building the hedge parts of their portfolios out of these kinds of investments. But when the only domestic options are dumb/boring, any "smart money" investor will either take their money and leave the country for greener pastures, or they'll pick up the skills required to play in foreign markets.

Gifted architects and builders are presumably born every year in Silicon Valley, but we are far too rich, developed, and democratic to want new buildings.

Other countries are free not to want the things that Silicon Valley talents generate. More for us!

Well, sure, anything could happen hypothetically. The financial environment is ultimately why investment happens in the U.S. and that starts at the top with the way the Fed is set up. Everything else follows.

But a country with the capital would do, who knows maybe China tries to import those "brains" into their country to compete with the US

So in this hypothetical, there is zero native US talent?