The U.S. Brain Drain: How Policies Are Driving Talent Away

Trump has unwittingly set off a brain drain of ‘intellectual refugees’ as U.S. applicants to U.K. jobs spike | Fortune

President Donald Trump’s pitch has been about bringing jobs back to the U.S. But a growing number of Americans would rather search for employment outside the U.S. amid the changing political landscape.

Americans made up 8.5% of foreigners interested in U.K. jobs in the first three months of 2025, an increase of 2.4 percentage points compared to a year ago. That makes Americans the fastest-growing U.K.-interested job group, and puts them not far behind leader India (11.3%), according to job search site Indeed.

After Trump's axing of billions in federal research funding, which has impacted the broader field of academia, more U.S. applicants in scientific research and management were clicking on job postings in Britain, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, warned in a LinkedIn post last month that “many U.S.-based scientists are looking for a Plan B.” This could be Europe’s chance to scoop up top American talent given that the U.S. is “destroying its public research funding system,” LeCun said.

Paul Graham, a computer scientist and cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote in a post on X that a foreign-born undergraduate student in the U.S. asked him if he should establish his startup in the U.K. given “the random deportations.”

“What an interesting twist of history it would be if the U.K. became a hub of intellectual refugees the way the U.S. itself did in the 1930s and 40s. It wouldn't take much more than what's already happening,” Graham, who was born in the U.K. and studied in the U.S., said in the post from Tuesday.

 

A critical Georgetown study from December 2019 warned about threats to US AI leadership due to immigration barriers. It's now 2025, and not only have we failed to act on its recommendations - we're doing the exact opposite, actively pushing international students out of the United States at an accelerated pace.

Recent examples:

• A PhD computer science student had his visa suddenly revoked over an absurd "fishing" violation without notification
• Dr. Guo-Jun Qi, an award-winning AI researcher and scientist, left the US after a decade-long career

The paper (linked below) found that over two-thirds of AI graduate students and more than half of the US AI workforce were born abroad. Retaining this talent is crucial to maintaining US leadership.

https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/keeping-top-ai-talent-in-the-united-states/

Spoiler: Paper summary

The U.S. depends heavily on international graduate students for its AI talent, with over two-thirds of AI-related graduate students and more than half of the AI workforce born abroad. Retaining this talent is crucial to maintaining U.S. leadership in AI, especially given domestic shortages. Historically, the U.S. has done well in this regard—over 80% of international AI PhDs stay in the U.S., including many from countries like China and Iran, and there's no evidence of recent declines in retention.

However, two major threats are emerging:

1. Worsening U.S. immigration barriers, including long green card wait times (up to 50 years for some), legal challenges to the OPT program, and the lack of a startup visa, particularly hurting entrepreneurial international graduates.
   
   
2. Rising global competition, with other countries investing heavily in AI ecosystems, improving education systems, and rolling out startup visas to attract talent trained in the U.S.

Key findings:

• Around 90% of international AI PhDs work in the U.S. after graduation, and most stay long term.
• U.S.-trained graduates often cite professional opportunities as the reason for staying, while immigration hassles are the top reason for leaving.
• The U.S. private sector is a major draw, but immigration rules hinder participation in startups.
• Most international graduates who do leave go to U.S. allies, not competitors like China.

Policy recommendations focus on:

• Immigration reform: streamline student-to-work transitions, codify OPT, reduce green card backlogs, and create entrepreneur visas.
• Security without overreach: improve coordination, monitor foreign recruitment practices, and collect better data—especially on master’s students.

Bottom line: without serious immigration updates, the U.S. risks losing its edge in the global AI talent race.

 

I recently listened to a Radiolab episode that told a remarkable story: In the 1960s, an $80k federal grant funded basic research that became the cornerstone of modern biomedicine. This modest investment enabled the development of PCR, the fundamental technique for analyzing DNA that has revolutionized everything from medical diagnostics to forensics to evolutionary biology.

This is the power of basic science research. Small investments that yield exponential, often unpredictable returns.

NOW.... we're witnessing unprecedented cuts to America's scientific infrastructure, threatening our global leadership and our future.

As noted by veteran science columnist Carl Zimmer, the consequences are already visible. Here are just some examples he provided:

• Established research programs are being terminated mid-project, including Columbia University's years-long study on chronic fatigue syndrome and major diabetes research initiatives.
• The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Fully built and ready to revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets and the universe, now sits grounded without launch funding (it was scheduled to be in orbit in two years).
• Environmental and public health science has been devastated. NOAA's climate science program shut down entirely, 1k EPA research scientists studying threats to human health laid off, and the CDC's entire office of lead poisoning experts disbanded.
• At NIH, approximately 10k biomedical researchers have been let go, including teams that were making significant progress on "universal" coronavirus vaccines that could protect against future outbreaks. Years of research and knowledge lost before findings can even be documented.
• Critical global health research, like work to cure tuberculosis (which still kills over 1 million people annually), has been defunded.

This wave of policy decisions is causing massive brain drain - driving innovative scientists to countries that value their work while discouraging the next gen of American scientists from pursuing research careers. While the US scales back, nations like China are aggressively expanding their research investments.

Spoiler

China’s total expenditure on research and experimental development (R&D) exceeded 3.6 trillion yuan ($494.69 billion) in 2024, marking an 8.3 percent year-on-year increase, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on Thursday.

The R&D expenditure recorded a steady growth, ranking as the second-largest globally last year, the Beijing Daily reported on Thursday.

According to the latest data from the NBS, China’s expenditure on R&D has steadily increased, with China’s total expenditure on R&D surpassing 3.6 trillion yuan in 2024, an increase of 8.3 percent compared with the previous year, realizing a stable growth. The total investment remained the second-highest in the world.

The results have been achieved due to China’s continuously improving policy system supporting scientific and technological innovations, the rapid establishment of a diversified investment framework, and the strengthened role of enterprises as key drivers of innovation, which collectively bolstered sustained R&D expenditure growth, according to the report.

In recent years, China has attached great importance to basic research, achieving significant progress in the construction of major scientific facilities and large-scale scientific infrastructure. A number of groundbreaking achievements have been made in fields such as quantum science, life sciences, material sciences and space science.

The rapid growth of funding for basic research lays a strong foundation for generating high-quality, original and groundbreaking scientific and technological breakthroughs, Xuan said.

 

History has many angles (why I love reading about it). I see societal progression as natural evolution - societies naturally adapt and improve over time. Attempting to forcibly return to systems or values from the past is a kind of artificial de-evolution that works against this natural development.