On the subject of work visas and brain drain, here’s an example of when US paranoia lead to a reverse brain drain. Qian Xuesen was a genius who worked under Von Karman and co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory among many other achievements.
Anti communist fervor at the time against China lead to him getting deported, despite very little evidence he was doing anything wrong.
As the Wikipedia page puts it
>On June 6, 1950, the Army abruptly revoked Qian’s security clearance, and he was questioned by the FBI. Despite support from his colleagues and no proof of the allegations, he received a deferred deportation order from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance intended to undermine his technical expertise
The closest thing there was is his connections to a communist group, but that one included people like Oppenheimer and Frank Malina. They were not some radical Marxist group, they were just smart people at a time where communist countries were not as tested and many intelligent people thought it would be the future (Einstein for example was also in support of socialism). This was a world where man had conquered over nature and they thought it was only natural that soon man will conquer over the economy too. They were wrong, but they were not radical dangers.
And thanks to this, Qian Xuesen got deported eventually returning to China. And since he was after all still a scientist with interest in science, he just kept doing it there. He is the “Chinese Father of Rocketry” all thanks to the US kicking him out.
>”So there’s this odd circularity. The US expelled this expertise, and it has come back to bite them.” In taking a tough line against domestic communism, he suggests, the country deported “the means by which one of their main communist rivals could develop their own missiles and space programme – an extraordinary geopolitical blunder.”
>A former US Secretary of the Navy, Dan Kimball – later head of the rocket propulsion company, Aerojet – once said it was “the stupidest thing this country ever did”.
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On the subject of work visas and brain drain, here’s an example of when US paranoia lead to a reverse brain drain. Qian Xuesen was a genius who worked under Von Karman and co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory among many other achievements.
Anti communist fervor at the time against China lead to him getting deported, despite very little evidence he was doing anything wrong.
As the Wikipedia page puts it
>On June 6, 1950, the Army abruptly revoked Qian’s security clearance, and he was questioned by the FBI. Despite support from his colleagues and no proof of the allegations, he received a deferred deportation order from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance intended to undermine his technical expertise
The closest thing there was is his connections to a communist group, but that one included people like Oppenheimer and Frank Malina. They were not some radical Marxist group, they were just smart people at a time where communist countries were not as tested and many intelligent people thought it would be the future (Einstein for example was also in support of socialism). This was a world where man had conquered over nature and they thought it was only natural that soon man will conquer over the economy too. They were wrong, but they were not radical dangers.
And thanks to this, Qian Xuesen got deported eventually returning to China. And since he was after all still a scientist with interest in science, he just kept doing it there. He is the “Chinese Father of Rocketry” all thanks to the US kicking him out.
>”So there’s this odd circularity. The US expelled this expertise, and it has come back to bite them.” In taking a tough line against domestic communism, he suggests, the country deported “the means by which one of their main communist rivals could develop their own missiles and space programme – an extraordinary geopolitical blunder.”
>A former US Secretary of the Navy, Dan Kimball – later head of the rocket propulsion company, Aerojet – once said it was “the stupidest thing this country ever did”.