Competition between The U.S. and China for talent is heating up

 The USA Competes Act of 2022, passed by the HOUSE of Representatives, includes a provision that exempts people with doctorates in science and engineering from national quotas for green card issuance. Analysts believe that if the provision takes effect, it will be more convenient for China’s top scientific and technological talents to stay in the United States, while improving the competitiveness of the United States in the war for scientific and technological talents between the United States and China.

The new law aims to help foreign entrepreneurs and STEM PhD graduates quickly obtain green cards, which means green card steps were changed.

The America COMPETES Act of 2022, passed by the HOUSE of Representatives on February 4, includes two provisions that would make it attractive for Skilled Chinese to start businesses in the United States and for Doctoral students from China who want to obtain green cards.

The bill proposes creating a “W” non-immigrant visa category for entrepreneurs of foreign technology companies. Under this provision, foreign start-up founders can apply for a “W” visa to expand their business in the United States if they meet certain requirements for equity ownership and investment scale, and obtain permanent resident (green card) status in the United States after meeting certain operating conditions.

The bill also exempts foreign PhD graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) from national quotas for applying for U.S. green cards.

At present, the United States issues about 140,000 green cards to professional immigrants each year, but applicants from any country can not be approved more than 7% of the total quota, resulting in a backlog of professional immigrants from China, India and other countries. The waiting time for applicants in some countries has been more than 20 years.

Some analysts say that if the immigration provisions of the USA Competition Act take effect, U.S. employers will be able to quickly obtain green cards for talented researchers from all over the world, including those in the technology industry early in their careers and in cutting-edge jobs, giving the United States a significant talent competitive advantage.

The 2022 USA Competes Act, passed by the House of Representatives, needs to be reconciled with the senate bill before it can be formally passed by congress and sent to the White House for president’s signature. If enacted, the immigration provisions in the bill would make it even more attractive for America to attract and retain foreign skilled workers.

Stuart Anderson, a senior contributor to Forbes magazine and executive director of the NGO Global Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), wrote that if enacted, it would be the most significant immigration legislation to come out of Congress in 30 years.

According to the Global Foundation for US Policy, more than 70 percent of STEM graduate students in US universities are from foreign countries, and an immigration reform measure that limited US universities to PHDS in STEM fields could benefit more than 10,000 people a year. The number of potential beneficiaries could be even higher each year, since the USA Competition Act also allows graduates with PHDS from foreign universities to apply for green cards in the US under the new law.

Graham Webster, a digital economy fellow at The New America Foundation and editor in chief of The DigiChina project at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, said the skilled immigration reform provisions in the USA Competition Act are “significant” for those who qualify. He said the current skilled immigration system puts foreign professionals working in the United States through a “highly uncertain and often painful process.”

But Wei also believes that the bill is only a small part of what immigration reform needs to solve.

“This is only a small part of the reforms that are necessary if the United States is really going to benefit from the talents of people trained here or who want to work and contribute here,” he told VOA by email.

A large number of China’s top scientific and technological talents “flow to the United States”

China produces more highly educated science and engineering talent each year than the United States, but experts say the quality of its top talent is not as good as the United States, and a large number of talented people choose to stay abroad each year.

According to a study released by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies in August 2021, Since the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, China has consistently outnumbered the US in the number of STEM PhD graduates, and the gap between the two countries is likely to widen further in the next five years, with estimates that by 2025, Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates a year, compared with 40,000 in the US.

However, China faces a talent disadvantage in key emerging technology areas and strategically important technology industries, such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI), where the US and China compete.

Paul Triolo, vice president of China and technology policy at the Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG), a global strategy consultancy, told VOA: “For complex processes such as semiconductor manufacturing, where it takes a lot of time to train enough engineers to master all the elements of the manufacturing process, Chinese companies have a talent problem, which is more of a quality problem than a quantity problem. Ideally, nurturing talent in this area requires access to the latest and greatest technology, both software and hardware.”

International students on temporary visas account for more than half of doctorates in economics, computer science, engineering, mathematics and statistics in the United States, according to a January report by the National Science Board. China accounts for the largest number of international STEM students (both undergraduate and graduate) in the US with 162,000, followed by India with 154,000, according to a 2018 State Department statistics report.

According to the Macro Polo Project of the Paulson Foundation in 2019, two-thirds of the top AI talents cultivated in China in the past decade worked abroad, mainly in the United States (85 percent). Tech companies such as Google and IBM and American universities are the preferred working places for Chinese AI talents.

“While Beijing has cultivated an army of top AI talent, more than half of them end up staying in the United States rather than being hired by domestic companies and institutions,” the report said. This is because most of the government’s resources are devoted to expanding the talent base rather than creating incentives and environments.”

There are signs that China saw the previous U.S. administration’s signal of a tighter immigration policy as an opportunity to recapture talent from overseas. However, due to the sound and open R&D and exchange environment in the United States and other Western countries, and the Chinese government’s crackdown on the innovative technology industry in recent years, China’s top technical talents still choose to develop abroad.

“The strength of Chinese people in AI research and application and the Trump administration’s immigration policy provide Opportunities for China to replenish high-end talent,” concluded the 2018 White Paper on AI City Development in China by CDIE Advisors, a Government-backed think tank in China. The report suggests that the government set up a special fund for overseas AI talents, provide financial support, housing and research projects for overseas senior talents working in China, open up channels for top AI talents to obtain Chinese green cards, and open up communication channels with top foreign research institutions.

But China’s efforts to recruit talent overseas seem to have failed to fill the gap at the top of the AI industry at home.

A briefing by the Institute for International Strategic Studies at Peking University on January 31 acknowledged that the wave of returnees had not been as good as expected. “The total number of AI practitioners in China is growing rapidly, but the number of high-end R&D talents in China is far behind that in the United States,” the report said. “China is a major source of undergraduate talent in ARTIFICIAL intelligence, but it is not a popular place to work.”

Citing overseas statistics, the report said 34 percent of China’s top AI talents are employed in China, while about 56 percent are employed in the United States. Of the Chinese who went to the US to study ARTIFICIAL intelligence, 88 per cent worked in the US after graduation, while only 10 per cent returned to China.

Analysis: While the United States advocates openness, China is attacking the innovative environment

Scott Kennedy, senior advisor and chairman of the Council for China Business and Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, told VOA that the problem of tech talent in China has been complicated in recent years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the slowdown in China’s Internet sector amid a crackdown.

“I think China has two different challenges in terms of talent,” says Kennedy. The first is the traditional brain drain, which has only been temporarily alleviated by the epidemic, so many Chinese have not been able to go to school and work abroad, but it will come back once the epidemic is over.”

“Another problem is that the [Chinese government’s] crackdown on private Internet companies has been interpreted by some young Chinese as a warning not to become entrepreneurs, to be cautious and to find stable jobs in known industries. That means less entrepreneurship, less innovation, not as a result of rising TENSIONS between the United States and China or an international brain drain, but rather a declining and deteriorating environment in China that is less attractive to innovators than before.”

Michael D. Frick, a Swiss expert on international business development who has worked for years in China’s IT and machine-building industries, said the United States remained a magnet for top talent even as the Chinese government introduced numerous programs and subsidies to lure back overseas talent.

“In my experience, the Chinese people I work with in universities and management, they are usually very patriotic and they want to go back home,” he said. But for the truly exceptional, America remains a magnet. So I think it remains to be seen whether these action plans that the [Chinese] government has put together will have a big impact and will bring people back to China.”

Frick also stressed that the platforms that attract international tech talent exchanges are usually in the West, and that for the truly top talent, “there are still more possibilities in the West.”

“Right now, the U.S. is still a huge net importer of talent — they have the best universities,” Mr. Frick said. “So the Chinese perception is still that if I want to be really successful in this field, I have to go abroad.”