Brain Drain: US Academia Reaping Benefits of Mexico's Low Salaries, Bureaucracy Tim Johnson - Florida Times-Union
go to original September 16, 2015

If Donald Trump thinks all Mexican migrants are criminals, it’s because he hasn’t met the likes of Pablo Meyer, a computational biologist, or Enrico Ramirez Ruiz, an astrophysicist.

They are two of the thousands of Mexicans with doctorates who’ve left their homeland, mostly for the United States, in a brain drain that saps Mexican academia of super-hot minds.

Some of them sought jobs in Mexico and couldn’t find them, securing slots instead on the faculties of U.S. universities. Others long to return. Still others did come back, only to get fed up with bureaucracy or disgusted by crime and return to the United States, where academia and industry recognize talent without regard to citizenship.

It’s the flip side of presidential candidate Trump’s calls for higher border walls to keep Mexican immigrants out. Highly skilled Mexicans also travel north and are met with open arms. By one estimate, 11,000 Mexicans with doctoral degrees reside and work in the United States. Another estimate says 27 percent of all Mexicans who hold such degrees work north of the border.

The United States reaps clear benefit from such an exodus.

“Americans are free riders in terms of Mexican brains,” said Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, a Mexican historian at the University of Chicago who got his master’s and doctorate at Stanford University in California.

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