To study a banyan tree, you not only must know its main stem in its own soil, but also must trace the growth of its greatness in the further soil, for then you can know the true nature of its vitality.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Consider a few statistics. In the 1990s, roughly 650,000 people from emerging markets migrated to the United States on professional-employment visas. Over 40 percent of the foreign-born adults in the United States have at least some college education, thereby making that country the epicenter of the global talent drain (Exhibit 1). Foreign-born workers now make up 20 percent of all employees in the US information technology sector. About 30 percent of the 1998 graduating class of the famed Indian Institute of Technology—and a staggering 80 percent of the graduates in computer science—headed for graduate schools or jobs in the United States. Some 80 percent of foreign doctoral students in science and engineering plan to stay there after graduation—up from 50 percent in 1985 (Exhibit 2). Roughly a third of the R&D professionals of developing countries have left them to work in the United States, the members of the European Union, or Japan.1
As the global...