Protecting America’s Tech Prowess Amid the Hostile Rhetoric of 2017

With the inauguration of Donald Trump as president on January 20th, the editors asked some of our Xconomists to offer their thoughts on “How could the incoming administration significantly affect your industry?”

My biggest concern would be a failure to recognize and take full advantage of the fact that America’s biggest asset is its technological prowess. Along with that comes the responsibility of leadership in developing the consensus to make long term investments in research and education and manage them effectively.

A lot of the technological innovation in the United States is done by recent immigrants who obtained their graduate degrees here, and who could, within a decade, choose to return—thereby gutting America’s technological superiority. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, projects that by 2019  “India’s GDP [gross domestic product] will exceed that of Japan and Germany combined”. India’s GDP has already overtaken the UK and France. The competition is global and the nation, under Trump’s leadership, needs to address that.

Visa regulations are blunt instruments that can’t be counted on to address fine-grained challenges in employment opportunities, wages, and the power of new nimble business processes. The short-term consequences are often painful for some individuals, but one often assumes that the nation is better served by the long-term benefits.

That said, I have a long-term concern of my own: The ready availability of an internationally trained work force reduces the need for U.S. corporations to work with K-12 educators and university researchers to address U.S. workforce needs. It also leaves our country vulnerable to sudden shifts in the interests of the diverse population of foreign-trained undergrads who currently make up a significant segment of many U.S. graduate programs. Hostile political rhetoric could exacerbate this vulnerability, and that could significantly affect our technological prowess.

[Editor’s note: You can read other responses to our questions here.]

Author: Ramesh Rao

Ramesh Rao is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, and director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. Rao earned his BE degree with honors in electronics and communications in 1980 from the University of Madras in Tiruchirapalli, India. He received his MS degree in 1982 and Ph. D. degree in 1984, both at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since then he has been on the faculty of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is currently Professor and Director of the San Diego Division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. In April 2004, he was named Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technology. His research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of computer and communication networks. He has authored over 100 technical papers, contributed two book chapters, and led many major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects as principal investigator. He was the Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and was a member of the Editorial Board of the ACM/Baltzer Wireless Network Journal as well as IEEE Network magazine. He has been twice elected to serve on the Information Theory Society Board of Governors ('97 to '99 and '00 to '02).