Blue Card and Talents

Last week in a Washington Post Column, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett emphasize the need to streamline the H1-B visa processing and compared it with European Union’s recent endorsement of Blue Card. The Blue Card is designed to attract highly educated workers to work in EU. The link to the full column is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR2007122101919.html

Through out the world we all should encourage the talented engineers, scientists and innovators and remove any obstacle whatsoever from their path.

The flows of talents are in couple of directions. One between developed countries in the western world, such as EU, USA and increasingly Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai etc. The other category is the flow of talents from developing world to the developed one. Some may argue that it may cause brain drain and those country continue to remain under develop; however opponent would argue that the flow of talent in long term benefit the originating country by creating a bridge between them and open future opportunities. On top of that, in the economic development, these talented individual may contribute to the originating country bringing the gained expertise and win-win business deals among the two nations.

I would like to encourage the thriving talented students in science and engineering as well as economics and public policy to sharpen their competence. There is more reason to bring new innovative ideas and develop new methods or tools to take this world to a better place. Please continue to do what you do best and that is your studies, experiments and research.