Now that flow of talent is slowing and it's America's own fault. Immigration measures put in place after Sept. 11, 2001, were particularly strict for those with technical backgrounds and months would crawl by as officials weighed each application.

"It was taking four or five months. It was debilitating," said Austin Fragomen Jr., an expert on immigration law and a co-managing partner at the international law firm of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in Boston.

Despite some recent improvements in visa processing, large numbers of otherwise desirable visitors, particularly science and engineering graduate students, have permanently left the U.S. queue for more welcoming shores, and the European Union is positioning itself to be their destination.

It is easy to see why Europe is laying out the red carpet. Developed economies across the globe cannot compete on the price of their labor with developing countries and are betting their future on finding a niche in knowledge-driven industries to sustain their populations.

The number of jobs requiring science and engineering skills jumped 15 percent in the United States from 1993 to 1997 and 28 percent in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.

The majority of new scientists and engineers, however, now are coming out of developing nations, said Fariborz Ghadar, who follows these trends as director of the Center for Global Business Studies at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa.

"More than 50 percent of the world's output of engineers is being trained right now in India and China," Ghadar told United Press International.

The training period is particularly important in the United States because it is right after graduate school that international students are best able to make the transition to employees.

This is partly a factor of being young and not yet rooted to a location or family. It also is a function of immigration laws that make it easier to hire someone right out of school than someone who has not studied in the United States or who has left for more than a year.

To hire someone from overseas, a U.S. firm must sponsor the prospective employee's visa. Though the number of such H-1B visas was 195,000 during fiscal years 2001, 2002 and 2003, the quota has since been slashed to 65,000 per year.

The limits can hang up a person's application for a year or more. All H-1B visas were already allocated for this fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2004 - the first day - so anyone applying Oct. 2 or later was out of luck before they started.

Foreign graduate students, however, are a special category. A recently passed law allocates an additional 20,000 H-1 visas specifically to holders of master's and doctoral degrees received in the United States.

Unfortunately, the number of international students in U.S. schools has plunged, Ghadar said, with a drop of 25 percent to 30 percent in master's and doctoral programs for all subjects except liberal arts.

The drop, by all accounts, is due to increased restrictions after Sept. 11, 2001. Demands for more information and delays in visa processing left many students without permission to go to school.

Not only was it much more difficult to get visas, it also was difficult to leave to visit family or have family members visit. Travel for international education programs became very difficult, and left many students cold to the idea of studying in the United States, which opened the door for European recruitment.

"It is an opportunity," acknowledged Rainer Gerold, director of Science and Society for the European Commission's Research Directorate. He added, however, the door likely would not be open for long.

Gerold, who is one of the leaders drafting the EU's plan for science, told UPI Europe is making a number of moves to attract talent. Topping the list, as described in last week's column, are increases in research funding.

Europe has pumped up its science budget by 17 percent since 2002 and now proposes to double the collective amount spent from 2006 to 2010 to $40 billion or 3 percent of gross domestic product.

The EU also is proposing a new, independent European Research Council that would have its own budget to fund long-term peer-reviewed research.

To help draw the estimated 700,000 new researchers needed to staff the programs, the European Commission proposes to better integrate newcomers culturally, make hiring them more attractive, and to make special efforts to address the needs of women scientists.

New tax breaks are among the leading ideas. By removing the need to pay the equivalent of Social Security taxes on immigrant employees in key subject areas, EU officials hope to encourage companies to open their doors a bit wider.

The proposal does not overcome all obstacles to hiring in the EU, but Gerold pointed to a doubling of foreign researchers and students in Germany over the past five year as evidence of success.

A proposal likely to be especially attractive to students, a new science visa, should be voted on by EU members this spring. It would allow foreign students and scientists to travel freely throughout EU countries.

"We need equal treatment for all researchers coming to work in the Europe," said Sigi Gruber, an EU Commission staff member working on the science visa and other mobility programs.

The mobility issue is included in a proposed Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers and the European Researchers Charter. Also part of the discussion are moves to make job opportunities easier to find and ensuring short-term contract researchers are treated equally with long-term staff.

Special attention also should be given to career advancement for women, said Professor Rolf Tarrach, of the University of Luxembourg, who noted women don't advance in many organizations, in part because child bearing interrupts their research.

"We want the (employment) committees to take (child bearing) into account as another (outside) activity," Tarrach said, so it will not affect their chances for advancement as much.

It remains to be seen if Europe's moves will add to the decline of the number of graduate students coming to United States. Hikes in U.S. tuition and competition from universities in China, India and Australia are long-term trends that will make it more difficult for the United States to reverse its decline.

"If nothing changes very much we will see a gradual shift by international students away from the United States and Western Europe (to) staying in their own schools," Ghadar said. "In my opinion, it will ultimately damage the U.S. economy. We will be (at less of an advantage) if we don't change."

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