For the last century, talented individuals have been lured away from their home countries, mostly lured by the fortune and stability provided by many Western nations. However has this trend started to reverse?
Lately there have been more and more birth nation returns by high-profile immigrant experts, especially to China, where stability and fortune have started to catch up with what the Western powers have so far had a monopoly on.
A society is built by its people, and a brain drain is a massively detrimental blow to a country’s success. Part of the failure of Nazi Germany was that many high-profile scientists who were Jewish, homosexual or against the Nazi regime fled Germany to the US and UK, to instead help the Allied forces combat the new scourge in Europe. These scientists were instrumental in developing the technology used to defeat Nazi Germany, and without them, it could be argued, the war might not have been won by the Allies.
Now as a large part of the Western society has started to embrace right-wing fascism yet again to solve self-made problems, the most intelligent members of society have continued to consider whether now is the time to jump ship, whether the Western world will collapse more and more into racism and hatred of immigrants due to their own inferiority complex, biases and ignorance.
Some of these high-profile returns are as follows:
Intel computer chip architect Su Fei has returned to China after 20 years in the US. An award-winning engineer has taken up a role at Tsinghua University.
There was news last month that top Harvard mathematician Liu Jun left the US for China. He is a major figure in Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning and computational biology. Although he mentioned the move wasn’t related to the current disaster of a US administration, but clearly returning to China after decades in a country means something has changed.
After 40 years in the US, pioneering mathematician Zhongwei Shen returned to China, to continue decades of research into partial differential equations and harmonic analysis.
Award-winning HIV scientist Shan Liang exited the US this summer to return to China and take up a role in a Chinese research institute.
AI scientist Cao Ting left his Microsoft lab for Tsinghua University after Chinese researchers were restricted in their work at Microsoft.
After 40 years abroad, cancer scientist Feng Gensheng has left the US for China as the Trump administration cut scientific funding.
Zhou Ming, a top engineer involved in Boeing, is yet another leading expert who has made the move to leave the US. A mastermind behind various plane designs left his role in the US to return to China, mentioning how excited he was to drive forward frontier research and technological innovation.
Yesterday it was reported another top scientist, Hu Ye, has quit the US after cuts to his department, a biomedical scientists who had worked in the US for 22 years, again returning to China to take up a role at Tsinghua University.
Even back in 2020, this exodus of experts was already happening, with Song-Chun Zhu, one of the world’s leading AI scientists, returning to China after spending half his life in the US.
Since 2010, the estimate is that 20,000 top scientists have left the US, too many to list in this article. This migration of scientists, some of the most intelligent members of society, should be sounding alarm bells in every citizen of the US. But most have no idea and continue to consume propaganda and bury their heads in the sand towards the massive issues facing the country.
A survey earlier this year revealed that 3 out of 4 US-based researchers were considering leaving the country, with China and Europe being the preferred destinations.
Even many non-Chinese born scientists are taking up positions in China, lured by a country that actually wants to support them rather than demonize them.
After all how could you blame them, when the current US sitting president has openly admitted that, “Smart people don’t like me,” someone who has slashed funding to many scientific endeavours, and now sends the military into his own cities illegally, funnelling billions into ICE to illegally detain and kidnap people, handcuffing children, enacting the mass abuse of human rights and causing untold deaths and suffering in the progress.
What’s clear is that things still aren’t as bad as they could get. With more and more experts seeing where the wind blows, many more will leave the sinking ship that is the United States of America, unless there is a massive course correction enacted.
