ABSTRACT
The scale of loss for the countries that suffer a brain drain and the benefits to the United States of these flows can be enormous. One study, which put a price tag on the human capital as well as on the cost of educating and training individuals, asserted that India transferred US$51 billion in human capital to the United States from 1976 to 1985. 1 A less shocking figure in a 1974 report to the U.S. Congress estimated that in 1971, the United States saved approximately $835.5 million (the cost of training emigrants who arrived that year), while in the same year the developing countries lost $326.3 million as a direct result of the brain drain. 2 According to a less reliable source, The Scientific Potential of America, published in 1977 in the USSR, from 1972 to 1977 the United States absorbed 220,000 foreign experts and thus saved no less than US$15-20 billion in educational investment and related spending. These figures also represent a net loss to developing countries. While these data may not be totally reliable, they do reflect the enormous benefits the United States has gained from its ability to attract foreign brainpower to its shores. For example, of 42 people living in the United States in 1962 who had won the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, 35.7 percent were either born overseas or had moved to the United States after winning the award. Similarly, of the 631 members of the American Academy of Sciences in 1961, 42.2 percent were born overseas or had received their higher education overseas. 3
