Country of Exiles (19 page)

Throughout the nineties, foreign workers on temporary visas held more than half of all postdoctoral positions in the United States (even as they were awarded, in some fields, nearly the same number of doctorates). Harvard, MIT, the University of California, Penn, and the like, depended on their labors.
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The Johns Hopkins Medical School had one hundred such temps on hand a year, whereas Duke Medical School boasted two hundred a year, and the University of Maryland at College Park found room for one hundred foreign temp professionals yearly, along with more than 140 other international faculty members and researchers.
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So far had this practice proceeded that in 1995 more than one hundred native-born American scientists organized a group called the Network of Emerging Scientists (NES), with the intent of helping “highly trained, hard-working individuals” find “stable employment” and to publicize and confront what they perceived to be an inequity. Jenny Cohen, a physics Ph.D. who worked briefly at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, served as first director of NES. Cohen was born in Minnesota and educated in New Mexico. The mother of a little girl and a devoutly religious orthodox Jew, she was married to a Cornell-educated physicist and had longed for a stable career in science and to settle down. But she (and others like her) were forced to move from town to town to find work. “We’ve been moving for work ever since we left Cornell in 1987,” she reported. She had also repeatedly lost out to temporary foreign professionals. “I care about people in this country,” Cohen said in 1996. “I would like to see the people of this country given some type of preference.”
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In the face of such objections, universities have continued
to justify their recruitment of foreign faculty, scholars, and graduate students (even as 75 percent of American workers themselves, many eager for an education, did not have college degrees).
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One argument has been that international students and scholars enriched campus culture, added to its “diversity,” and gave everyone insight into people “from all different backgrounds,” as a Harvard official put it. “Foreign students” correct the “Eurocentric bias,” echoed another educator from Georgetown University, “bringing a special angle Americans lack”—for instance, “the Brazilian, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, or Indonesian way of thinking.”
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Others have emphasized economic arguments—the “cheap labor” supplied by the post-docs, graduate students, and faculty (although in some cases foreign faculty received very high salaries); or the “billions of dollars” spent by foreign-born students on tuitions, housing, entertainment, and food.
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Still others have mounted no defense whatever but have explained the influx as a logical outcome of “free market prices” (people go automatically where they get paid the most) or of “the global restructuring process” beyond anyone’s control (individuals cannot be blamed, in other words, for what “world forces” make them do).
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The economic rationales seemed the most correct, as well as the most obvious. But officials preferred another position in line with their global ideology, which said that it no longer mattered where skilled people came from or why. What mattered was
excellence
, getting the best students and the most cutting-edge faculty. In 1990 William Kirwan, president of the University of Maryland at College Park and spokesman for many university associations, testified on this issue before Congress, which was then debating the merits of immigration reform. “The subject of global interdependence,” he said, in what was already a standard line, “is no more evident than in academia, where the development and exchange of knowledge
is increasingly an international exercise. Ideas and learning know no national boundaries.” Besides, he said, “the excellence of our programs” has rested on “the quality of faculty we are able to recruit from an international pool of teachers and scholars.” Moreover, this dependence is greater today than ever, given the “shortage of world-class excellence in our university and college faculties. Academic institutions must have access to the very best … from this nation and from across the world. Merely being qualified would not be sufficient.”
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This argument was flawed, not least because it was terribly wrong about the “shortage of world-class excellence” in America. Ever since the mid-1970s (if not earlier), American educators predicted that a scarcity of talent would cripple education and the economy and that unless American universities recruited foreigners, the nation would lose the competitive struggle or the “struggle for excellence.” No such scarcity ever happened, however. What happened was glut, a surfeit of Einsteins in many fields—and especially in those fields (engineering, biotech, molecular biology, neuroscience, and so forth) that formed the foundation of the “new economy.” At the same time, ever since the late 1980s, the available jobs in these professions have shrunk dramatically, with the results that an extraordinary pool of skilled labor—of young people unable to find permanent positions but, given the steep investment in their education, willing to take whatever they could—has been at the beck-and-call of universities and corporations.
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Employers and “mature scientists” in need of lab technicians, of course, have celebrated this state of things, since they have enjoyed optimal access to skilled labor at bargain-basement prices; foreign nationals, too, have had cause for satisfaction, since they have received stipends exceeding anything possible in their homelands. For native-born Americans, however, the
situation has been a disaster. It has produced for them what the National Research Council, a prestigious research body in Washington, has called a “crisis of expectations.” Forced to compete with an ever-growing number of foreign nationals and compelled to find work that does not fulfill them, many have increasingly lost hope in the future.
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But Kirwan’s position was flawed as well because it dismissed the gravity of what was once called the “brain drain.” Years ago, statesmen worried that rich nations were robbing poor ones of desperately needed human capital. In the late 1960s, Paul Douglas, liberal senator from Illinois and an architect of workers’ compensation laws during the New Deal as well as of later civil rights legislation, argued that “from the standpoint of the world and of the developing countries, it would be socially desirable that fewer scientists and technicians should migrate and that they should instead stay at home or return there after their training elsewhere.” Douglas even suggested that the United States help set up “great international universities … in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to help train the most talented without deracinating them.”
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Despite these concerns, hospitals and schools throughout the country turned heavily in the 1970s to immigrant professionals to fill jobs, spurred by a “brain drain” preference visa in the 1965 immigration law. By 1980 more than one-fourth of all immigrants who had arrived in the 1970s were technicians or professionals, including 7,000 Filipino doctors (1,000 more than the number of African-American physicians). Such use of immigrants reinforced institutional racism in the country, discouraging the training and hiring of native-born minorities. Nevertheless, anxieties about the international brain drain continued to dribble away, replaced in the 1990s by a fresh concept, the “brain gain.” Even such an authority on the migration of talent as Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading international economist at
Columbia University, dropped the brain-drain concept for brain gain, although for a long time he had wrestled with the moral challenge of brain drain from different angles.
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The son of Brahmans (his brother was for years the chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court), Bhagwati was born in Bombay in 1934, and received higher degrees in England (at Cambridge University) and in the United States (at MIT). In the late sixties he returned home to India, only to complain about Indian policies that restricted the flow of scholars abroad. It was about this time, too, that he first defended the brain drain, on the grounds that India had little to offer ambitious people like him—no core, he said, of “eminent people to generate purely locally the kind of atmosphere and possibilities of continuing mutual discussions which alone can keep one on one’s toes.” India was so intellectually desolate, he argued in 1967, that “the talented Indian academic” who refused to leave would be “committing ‘academic suicide.’ ”
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Bhagwati soon left India for a job at MIT, where he had second thoughts about the brain drain, thoughts he continued to have into the next few decades, as he struggled to put the phenomenon into some kind of moral light. He wondered, in 1976, “Which country does the mobile citizen ‘belong to’?” “If there is international mobility of people,” he asked, “how” can they be made accountable? Shouldn’t “intellectuals at many levels” who had enjoyed so many advantages from their own countries and had prospered abroad be “taxed” or compelled to share with their brethren some of the benefits reaped from their migration?
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Bhagwati believed that some kind of “global” tax plan, managed by the United Nations, might appeal to the “moral instincts” of the many eminent people who had left their homelands.

By the early nineties, however, Bhagwati had thrown in the towel, disavowing the brain-drain argument—and along with
it any hand-wringing over taxation—for brain gain. In a co-authored article titled “Foreign Students Spur U.S. Brain Gain,” versions of which appeared in
Challenge
and on the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
, he returned in spirit to a position he had advanced in the late 1960s. He argued that skilled migrants did not “drain” so much as “bring glory to their countries of origins”; and they “helped” their countries “through political lobbying in the U.S.” America benefited, too, now more than ever. Singling out Indian students, he reminded his readers that these students were “among the best” who “have gone to the best institutions at home,” graduates of India’s government-funded “Institutes of Technology modeled on MIT.” Korean and Taiwanese students, too, he noted, belonged to the “top” echelons of their societies. America was indeed lucky and should reward all these students—especially those in “science and engineering”—with “automatic green cards.”
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Along with Kirwan and others, Bhagwati saw the brain drain as a blessing. But it was “the worst sort of imperialism,” to quote Craig McCaw, founder of McCaw Cellular, because it separated the best-trained minds from their places, where many might have remained, as educators and builders. (Whether they were really the
best
minds, however, as Bhagwati said, was another matter; one might have found many more of them in the Bombay slums or elsewhere in rural India, where millions of Untouchables still live, doing the dirty work of the “higher ups.”)
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In 1968 V. M. Dandekar, an Indian scholar who never left India, said of Bhagwati that “he knows better and knows it too well that whatever the prestige of the individual Indian scientists abroad may be, it is the scientists working in their own countries, often anonymously, in poor conditions, improvising with native genius to overcome
severe handicaps in resources and equipment, who are bringing effective prestige to their countries in the world community.”
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Bhagwati and others in the research universities glorified the divorce of brains from place, spirit from place. That divorce, moreover, helped to convert campuses into international enclaves, remote in many ways from the rest of America, especially for the majority of Americans unable to pay for elite education and at the expense of the many trained American professionals unable to find work in the academy. It added yet another level of mobility to an already established system of domestic circulation, carrying people away from their communities into the more anonymous space of the modern university and beyond into the placeless world of transnational enterprise.

The new university had one last aspect to it, which rounded out the internationalism shaped by the business alliances and by the recruitment of foreign-born talent. This aspect was a campus culture hospitable to the outside world in a way unlike anything Americans had known in the past.

Many universities have reconfigured campus intellectual life to meet the needs of non-native-born students. Earlier, when such students enrolled in America’s best universities, they never encountered campuses that assisted them as universities do today. Since 1980, however, elite schools have provided international students with clubs, newspapers, magazines, and special societies. They have employed hundreds of immigration lawyers and foreign student advisers, whose sole business was to know the immigration laws and to help students and
faculty understand and finesse them. One Indian-born scholar has observed that “most universities have so many international faculty” that “they’ve gotten used to [dealing] with how immigration works.… They have a person in the personnel office [whose] job is to handle all the relevant matters about foreign faculty.”
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Friendly provisions, moreover, have accommodated nearly
all
“outsiders,” domestic as well as foreign. In prior decades, schools sought to attract students with athletics, clubs, and “Greek” societies.
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But, after 1980, they added to the menu of enticements; they tried to make campuses seem like utopian spaces in which most “outsider” voices (ethnic, racial, sexual) found expression and acceptance. Fed by an older stream of racial-gender politics and by the new immigration, “diversity practices” sprang up on many campuses to encourage students to “break the prejudice habit” and “embrace the Other.”
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An army of university administrators committed themselves to “de-provincializing” their student bodies (particularly the American-born students).
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Obsessed with demography, they hired people for such new positions as “Multicultural director” or “diversity ombudsman”; they also redesigned their facilities to express the “multicultural” vision. The University of California, Santa Barbara, for instance, has both a large “Multicultural Theater”—explicitly to reflect the interests of Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays, and lesbians—and a glass-enclosed multicultural space on the second floor of the student library, plainly visible and separate, where one can find the special gender and ethnic collections.
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