Guest commentary: The global race for talent
By Vlad Vaiman
California Lutheran University
In the twenty-first century, oil and steel matter less than an infinitely scarcer resource: talent. A small number of people in a wide range of fields – from artificial intelligence or biotechnology to finance or the arts – are capable of producing disproportionate economic and cultural value.
The top talent (or superstar) effect is real, as confirmed by recent research: the best one percent of researchers produce more than 20% of all citations, and top coders in their twenties earn seven- and even eight-figure salaries.
The “superstar effect” extends far beyond the lab or the trading floor. Through ultra-cheap digital distribution, musicians, designers, and entrepreneurs with global audiences can do so with only a laptop and an internet connection. As artificial intelligence is more widely deployed to amplify the work of high performers, the value of the best talent will only increase.
But here’s the paradox: the world has far more talent than it uses.
Even when low-income country students perform as well as their wealthier peers in international math competitions, they are half as likely to publish research or earn a doctorate at an elite institution. Structural barriers, from inadequate schooling to restrictive immigration regimes, waste vast pools of human potential.
But not all have missed the point. Switzerland and Singapore, for example, appear regularly at the top of global indices for talent competitiveness, and there is much to learn from their policy frameworks. Switzerland has capitalized on its multilingual culture, high-quality universities, and stable political institutions to attract researchers, entrepreneurs, and financial services professionals.
Its apprenticeship systems provide skilled workers, and openness to international collaboration keeps knowledge flows going. The presence of multinational company headquarters and international organizations is critical as well: in economists’ jargon, it has created a “thick labor market” in which specialized skills can be easily traded.
Singapore perhaps offers the clearest example of deliberate talent policy. Confronted by a lack of natural resources, the city-state has invested systematically in education at all levels from early childhood to research institutes such as A*STAR.
Immigration rules are selective but pragmatic: the government has long recruited scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to plug gaps in national capability. Generous research funding and world-class infrastructure have made Singapore a magnet for life sciences, fintech, and digital industries.
In both cases, the model is clear: strategic openness to foreign talent, educational excellence, and a high degree of integration between public and private investment. By removing obstacles for skilled migrants and also ensuring domestic systems can identify and nurture home-grown talent, they have maintained their competitive edge despite their relatively small populations.
The competitive threat does not stop with other small, nimble states. Large advanced and emerging economies are also adjusting. Britain has recently considered the abolition of visa fees for skilled migrants, and France is targeting foreign researchers with relocation packages. China, for its part, has launched a new range of visas for young foreign scientists and lavishes attention on returnees from Western universities.
The logic is simple: confronted by aging populations and declining workforce growth, advanced economies can no longer rely on demographics to underpin productivity. Only innovation, and the talent that drives it, can ensure continued prosperity.
AMERICA’S CROSSROADS
The U.S. should be winning this race, at least on paper. Its universities are the most highly ranked in the world. It has a culture that prizes entrepreneurship and rewards risk-taking.
And for much of its history, it has drawn upon a seemingly endless supply of talent to replenish its workforce as an immigrant nation. Many of the founders and top executives of America’s most valuable technology companies were immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Recent policy decisions, however, have put these advantages at risk. In September 2025, the Biden administration announced a $100,000 visa application fee for H-1B visas. This dramatic fee hike makes it costlier than ever for American companies to hire foreign graduates.
The H-1B program has long been a means of admitting 85,000 skilled workers each year, with annual demand far outstripping available supply. Indian graduates have filled roughly three-quarters of recently issued visas. Indian graduates have played a particularly important role in enabling U.S. tech competitiveness.
Economists say these changes will only hasten the pace of offshoring. One study found that when a similar set of restrictions was placed on H-1B visas in the mid-2000s, the firms most reliant on them increased their foreign employment by about 25%, with much of the R&D-intensive work following U.S. engineers overseas. Even now, large multinational “global capability centers” in India are increasingly taking on work once performed in Silicon Valley. Canada, which has also long had open immigration policies, is another potential winner.
At the same time, U.S. domestic efforts to foster the best and the brightest have faltered. In the early 2020s, gifted education programs were rolled back amid political controversies over equity. Identifying the next generation of potential geniuses is often left to chance or individual initiative.
Taken together with immigration restrictions, this could compound what scholars have called the “lost Einsteins” problem: people who could have been great innovators but do not have the chance to develop their talents due to socioeconomic barriers.
IDENTIFYING AND EMPOWERING TALENT
The secret to building science superpowers is talent, pure and simple. The most successful countries take steps to identify and attract the world’s smartest people. International math and science Olympiads provide a preview.
Their medalists are dozens of times more likely to go on to win major scientific prizes. The evidence suggests that countries that engage in systematic talent identification – through competitions, mentorship programs, and scholarships – end up with more innovators.
How to get access to talent once it’s been found is also crucial. Scholarships, reduced financial barriers, and direct investments in research universities can all mold the productive capacity of nations, as Singapore’s targeted funding for biotech and artificial intelligence has shown.
Immigration policy is a similarly powerful lever. Skilled migrants are complements, not substitutes, for the native-born workforce. They form companies, file patents, and create spillovers that benefit their fellow citizens. The extraordinary success of immigrant-founded firms in America’s information technology sector has been well-documented.
Talent also needs an ecosystem in which to thrive. Dense concentrations of highly skilled workers drive innovation, as seen in Switzerland’s financial services cluster or Singapore’s life sciences parks.
If the United States wants to remain at the frontier of innovation, it must bring its policies into line with these global trends.
Visa policy, in particular, needs a reboot. Punitive fees should be eliminated and procedures for high-skilled migrants, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, should be streamlined. A new focus on gifted education is also necessary. If the United States were to close gaps in class, gender, and race among inventors, it would quadruple the number of American innovators.
Public-private partnerships also need to be reinforced so that national research priorities in areas such as artificial intelligence, climate tech, and the health sciences are coherent with the ecosystems in which talent can flourish.
In many ways, the United States still enjoys unmatched advantages in scale, institutions, and culture. But if it does not lower barriers, invest in domestic talent, and welcome the best and brightest from around the world, it risks watching the next generation of superstars innovate elsewhere.
In a world where human capital has become the ultimate source of competitive advantage, complacency is the most expensive mistake of all.
• Vlad Vaiman is a professor at California Lutheran University’s School of Management.
