The Brain Drain to America Has Frozen
The science diaspora has stopped moving into America. Travel outside the US has become impossible for American scientists, and you risk ruin if you are an immigrant-American scientist. At the same time, foreign scientists have strong incentives not to travel into the US. From the outside, America has long appeared dangerous and violent, particularly from a European perspective. Nearly every country has its headline story of a tourist being detained, harassed, or killed. This is not a new problem, and it predates the current administration. But recent policy has poured gasoline on it; a more appropriate metaphor might be that it’s frozen, it’s on ICE.
Add visible xenophobia, aggressive immigration enforcement, and overtly anti-science policy, and you create an environment where saying goodbye to your spouse before going to an American conference feels like a risk calculation. The presence of ICE with broad detention authority does not encourage scientific exchange. “Broad detention authority” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
When I moved from Diamond to APS, I was under the impression that I could continue attending international conferences. When in the UK, I traveled extensively. Conferences were where ideas and techniques jumped borders, and where you learned what people were actually doing rather than what they eventually wrote up. But I was wrong, and a little misled.
In the US synchrotron system, the people who actually do the experiments rarely travel. Conference attendance is reserved almost exclusively for group leaders, grant writers, and senior PIs. And as everyone in US science knows, grant writers are not the people thinking about and doing the experiments; they’re just in charge of the money. PIs are writing grants and papers and reporting to the infinite hierarchy above them.
This matters because the US synchrotron ecosystem already relies heavily on imported expertise. That pipeline is dry. Almost all major synchrotron equipment is manufactured outside the US, with a few notable exceptions like Mitegen (by the way, I’m not happy that the Bills beat the Jaguars yesterday). For decades, we compensated for this by importing people. Talent came here because pay was better, facilities were strong, and the ecosystem rewarded ambition.
American scientists are still paid better than their counterparts elsewhere, and that has helped keep talent here. But money cannot buy ideas, experience, or the kind of institutional knowledge that only emerges through repeated, informal interaction with a global community. And institutional knowledge is opaque from the outside. If you are not embedded in those conversations, you do not even know what you are missing.
So we remain hamstrung by travel budgets and crazy strict regulations, bizarre administrative barriers, and now geopolitical reality. We cannot easily go out to get ideas, and increasingly, ideas will not come to us. For the foreseeable future, nothing fundamental is going to change. The quiet isolation of American synchrotron science will continue. For shame.
