WASHINGTON — For years, United States policy makers have been debating the idea of granting green cards to foreigners with science doctorates. The cell biologist Xiao-Wei Chen, at the University of Michigan, is no longer waiting for them to decide.
Mr. Chen, whose work on cholesterol metabolism helped him win a job competition this year at the National Institutes of Health, is instead making plans to return home to China and his undergraduate institution, Peking University.
“The opportunities there might be more nourishing for young people like me to develop scientifically,” he said.
Mr. Chen remains in a minority. Most top-ranked Chinese students offered jobs at American institutions after finishing doctorates still choose to stay. “He’s more the exception than the rule,” said Denis F. Simon, a professor of politics and global studies at Arizona State University who specializes in China policy.
Yet Mr. Chen might also be a warning flag: As Congress debates whether to extend green-card privileges to foreign students earning doctorates in the sciences, the question may be growing moot. Top-ranking students are already finding that they can stay if they want — and many do not. The nation’s continuing disinvestment in science is making overseas options appear increasingly attractive.
“Anybody in academe knows,” says Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Harvard University expert in the global competition for scientific talent, “the offers coming from Chinese institutions are getting more and more attractive.”
As the world grows more interconnected, says Mr. Simon, distance from the United States becomes less of an impediment to career success.
Mr. Chen’s case gained attention in April during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing with the heads of the major federal science agencies.
The event was a call for helping the economy by investing more federal money in scientific research. Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, took the opportunity to bemoan the loss of many accomplished Asian students. “What a waste, that we would bring this talent to America, train it, and then invite it to leave,” he commented.
A bill Mr. Durbin has been promoting, backed by the Obama administration and leading lawmakers from both parties, would grant a green card, or permanent legal residency, to any foreigner who earned a doctorate in a science or engineering field at an American university and received a job offer based on it.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis S. Collins, responded to Mr. Durbin by telling him about Mr. Chen and the multimillion-dollar package he was offered by Peking University, and how China’s approach to pursuing research compared with the prolonged period of budgetary stress facing scientists in the United States.
“Certainly the visa situation is a big part of the issue, and it would be great to get that fixed,” Dr. Collins told the senator. “But even if that’s fixed, then people don’t see that there’s a future for them by staying in the American medical system — and it looks much brighter in Singapore or China or South Korea or Brazil — then they’re going to go where the opportunities are.”
Some in Congress are concerned about declining federal support for science — the National Institutes’s budget is about 25 percent smaller than it was 10 years ago, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
“China is about to eat our lunch,” Rep. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, told a staff briefing last month on Capitol Hill.
Speaking from Ann Arbor, Mich., Mr. Chen reiterated Dr. Collins’s point about economics being more important than visa rules. Even without the green-card legislation, versions of which have been pursued unsuccessfully in Congress for years, Mr. Chen said he had seen that most top-ranked foreign science graduates who really wanted to stay in the United States managed to find a way.
While a green-card bill may help foreign science graduates ranked at middle and lower performance levels, those recognized as star performers are eligible for visas, based on certain high-demand skills. “A visa is definitely not too much of a problem for many good people,” Mr. Chen said.
Two of the most high-profile losses of foreign scientific talent in recent years — Shi Yigong, a Princeton University biology professor who left for Tsinghua University, and Rao Yi, a Northwestern University neurobiologist who decamped to Peking University — even had United States citizenship and gave it up.
Those cases, and that of Mr. Chen, suggest that foreign scientists consider factors more varied than may be assumed in many policy debates.
Mr. Chen earned an undergraduate degree from Peking University in 2002 and went to Michigan, where he earned a doctorate in physiology in 2008. This year he was among a handful of winners chosen from several hundred applicants for the Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigators program at the National Institutes of Health.
But the actual appointment of a Stadtman winner to an N.I.H. division is dependent on annual budget allocations, and Mr. Chen was told that he would probably need to wait another year or more to get a posting. Instead he accepted the offer from Peking University, which included modern lab facilities, a supply of graduate students, and — most important, he says — confidence that his budget would remain robust for many years to come.
Rather than hold out the prospect of a visa that becomes an increasingly less valuable enticement for top foreign scientists, United States policy makers might instead consider reviving federal support for research and making conditions easier for American scientists to collaborate with global partners, said Mr. Simon, of Arizona State.
Still, the relatively few top science graduates who return home to foreign countries should not be regarded by Americans as somehow “lost” or “wasted” investments, he added.
“The interesting question is not whether one stays or goes,” he says, “but what one does wherever they are.”
本文来源：网易教育频道综合
责任编辑：
王晓易_NE0011
