Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog and a Reverse Brain-Drain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part III

The founders of the United States considered intellectual property worthy of a special place in the Constitution. In today's knowledge-based economy, capturing value from intellectual capital and knowledge-based assets has gained even more importance. This paper is the third in a series of studies focusing on immigrants' contributions to the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Earlier research revealed a dramatic increase in the contributions of foreign nationals to U.S. intellectual property over an eight-year period.

In this paper, the authors offer a more refined measure of this change and seek to explain this increase with an analysis of the immigrant-visa backlog for skilled workers. The key finding from this research is that the number of skilled workers waiting for visas is significantly larger than the number that can be admitted to the U.S. This imbalance creates the potential for a sizeable reverse brain-drain from the U.S. to the skilled workers' home countries.

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