Despite the self-loathing of progressives in American science academia, America is a pretty good place to be, even after 15 years of onerous visa restrictions that have made it difficult to hire the best people and forces immigrants educated here to return home because they aren't allowed to work.

Well, legal immigrants anyway.  Illegal immigrants even get cheaper tuition in California.

Science education does not stink, despite what some claim - test scores go up every year, adult science literacy has tripled in the last 25 years and fully a third of adult Americans count themselves as scientifically curious.  Anti-science climate change kooks on the right and organic food kooks on the left may get all of the media attention but in the middle, people are hungry for science, especially from scientists.

The 'brain drain' is happening in other countries, not the US.  I have said it many times - cultural pundits, including in science funding organizations, who have a fetish to increase their power through greater pocketbooks, will insist we need to convince smart kids who want to be doctors that they should be physicists, or convince people who want to be baseball players they should be biologists.

In actuality, we don't need to turn more Americans into scientists, we need to turn more scientists into Americans.  Yes, we already produce more  Ph.D.s than can possibly get jobs, that is why thousands and thousands of janitors and waiters have a Dr. title, but science jobs are out there.  The humanities are on their own, of course.

Writing at Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik discusses German efforts to try and bring smart people home - despite European claims of superior culture and progressive economics, 50% of Germans who get a Ph.D. in America stay in America rather that return to Deutschland.

That's good.  What is bad is for us to allow a Clinton-era protectionist visa scheme to continue to block out qualified foreign workers who want to remain in the U.S.A.  The notion that foreign workers were somehow undercutting domestic jobs was always a myth and the visa restrictions did nothing except force companies to send the jobs where the people were.   No company wants to fall on the sword of progressive policy and hire someone local because they happened to be born in America, they want the best people.  

Germany wants its people back - and is happy to let 1990s American protectionism do half the work; the other half is paying money to post-docs who come to the US and not taxing it and other incentives designed to instill loyalty.  They are also trying (we'll see how that goes) to reinvent German science on a more American model; an assistant professor in America can create a research agenda but in Germany only full professors have any real clout - and there aren't many of those jobs coming open each year.

America also allows more flexibility when it comes to working with private companies.   While the government has passed the 50% mark of basic research in recent decades, overtaking the private sector, that has only happened because the private sector is happy to allow taxpayers to fund the numerous failures of basic research before striking gold and academics are happy to believe that approach is better for everyone while they complain about the government grant process - we don't need a Bell Labs if universities are getting government money to do it instead.   Biotech still operates under a capitalist model, for the most part - they don't want academia doing the basic research because it is far too slow, but they are happy to fund various aspects of projects at universities.   That opportunity really isn't there in Germany, or generally in Europe.

America has the advantage.  Young German scientists are skeptical that German academia will suddenly reform and give assistant professors some authority and a real career path.   But our protectionism means that, in a bad economy, smart foreign researchers are the first to get cut.  And that's bad for America.   The longer smart researchers stay in the US, regardless of their place of birth, the more likely they are to remain and raise families and make America a better country.   We can't just create more money but we can throw off the shackles blocking legal immigrants from getting jobs and living here if they want.

Let's fix our system before Europe fixes theirs.