Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (29 page)

When immigration is temporary or circular, or when immigrants maintain close ties to their home countries, valuable exchanges of ideas are facilitated, and the country of origin benefits from the immigrant’s experiences in a more modernized society.

COSTS

The primary cost associated with emigration for the country of origin is the “brain drain,” or the loss of some of its brightest citizens.

When immigrants are skilled and/or highly educated, the sending country experiences not only the loss of that worker and his contribution to society, but also the investment made in his education or training and the potential for him to mentor and teach others. Considering making an international move requires some financial solvency and entrepreneurship from anyone, even unskilled workers who emigrate are a loss to their country of origin.

The effect of “brain drain” is acute in many developing nations where doctors and nurses are in short supply locally because they have been so heavily recruited to make up for shortfalls in developed countries such as the United States.

PBS
Frontline/World
’s Barnaby Lo has reported that the United States is expected to have a deficit of eight hundred thousand to one million trained nurses by the year 2020, and the American government actively recruits medical personnel all over the world with special visas. Lo goes on to note that because the nursing shortfall is so extreme and the recruitment so lucrative, many trained engineers, teachers, and even doctors in places such as the Philippines, India, and South Africa are abandoning their careers to enter nursing school with an eye toward emigration. In the Philippines alone, a study by the country’s former Secretary of Health found that “80 percent of all government doctors have become nurses or are in nursing schools. There are roughly 9,000 doctors-turned-nurses and 5,000 of all these medical practitioners are now working abroad.”
¹
The public health and economic effects of this trend are potentially devastating to developing countries.

Not only are financial successes and talents transferred to the recipient country, but also potentially valuable political assets are, as well. When the best and brightest leave, they take potential reformist energy and acumen with them.

So we can see that whether an immigrant’s decision to relocate hurts or helps his country of origin is highly subjective and situational. Countries of origin usually have little say over the matter, unlike the immigrant (if he is acting voluntarily) or the recipient country (to the extent that it can enforce its legal restrictions on immigration). Rarely, and only in highly repressive regimes, are people prevented from voluntarily leaving their country. The country of origin is thus largely a passive actor in the immigration equation.

Some developing countries have experimented with tying financial assistance for in-country education with promises to students to stay at home for a period of years after graduation; others have tried financial grants to study abroad with promises of return. But these measures are difficult to enforce and have been met with limited success.

For example, Iran lost over one million people after the revolution, many of whom where highly educated and trained. As a result, the nation’s economy suffered, totaling a loss of around $30 to $40 billion.
²
According to Migration Information Source, over 45,000 Iranians immigrated to the United States alone just before and during the revolution, while over 150,000 more immigrated during the following decade. Moreover, as stated by Migration Information Source,

Because the second wave [after the Revolution] included large numbers of professionals, entrepreneurs, and academics, it accelerated the “brain drain.” . . . According to the Ministry of Culture and High Education, right before the revolution and subsequent closure of all universities in 1980, there were 16,222 professors teaching in Iran’s higher education institutions. When the universities reopened in 1982, this figure had plummeted to 9,042.
³

Though many Iranian immigrants had originally planned to return, in many cases, they have yet to make their way back to Iran. And as time passes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that they will, in fact, return. Even years after the revolution, reportedly the brain drain continues to occur in Iran at higher levels because of the country’s inability to satisfy the needs of its citizens, especially those who are highly educated. The Migration Information Source further reported that the government is trying to establish efforts such as creating additional jobs to mitigate the problem, but the “results of these efforts have not yet materialized.”
⁴

Though Michel Amsalem is not Iranian, he, along with his family, was forced to immigrate as a result of political and social unrest in his home country, Algeria. And like many of the Iranians who left as a result of the revolution and did not return, Amsalem has no future plans to return home. But when Amsalem initially left Algeria, he did not head directly for the United States. His eventual life in the United States has involved multiple moves in different countries.

NOTES

1. Barnaby Lo, “Philippines: Have Degree, Will Travel. Where Have All the Nurses Gone?”
PBS.org
, December 18, 2007,
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/12/philippines_hav.html
(accessed October 30, 2013).

2. Shirin Hakimzadeh, “Country Profiles: Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home,” Migrations Policy Institute, September 2006,
http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=424
(accessed July 9, 2013).

3. Hakimzadeh, “Country Profiles: Iran.”

4. Hakimzadeh, “Country Profiles: Iran.”

21

How Did He Get Here: Michel Amsalem

M
ichel Amsalem was born in Oran, Algeria, in 1947, into a family that had been granted French citizenship by Napoleon III, who, on a trip to Algeria in the 1860s, stayed with Amsalem’s family. His surname means “people united” in Hebrew, and his family proudly traces its Sephardic Jewish roots back to fourth-century Algeria, before the Arab invasions. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, his mother’s family settled in Morocco, after being chased from the Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish Inquisition. His mother’s maiden name, Maïmaran, in fact means “never converted” in Portuguese. A census taken on June 1, 1960, showed there were 1,050,000 non-Muslim civilians in Algeria at that time, or 10 percent of the total population, including 130,000 Jews.

As a result of their centuries-long stay in Algeria and Morocco, Jews were fully integrated in the local society and culture, even though they lived somewhat separately. That changed markedly after France took over these two countries, in 1830 for Algeria and at the beginning of the twentieth century for Morocco. Jews were much quicker than Muslims to assimilate into French culture, to learn French, and to take advantage of the French education system. In the 1870s, all Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship by the “Décret Crémieux,” an act sponsored by the then-French minister of justice Adolphe Crémieux, which further separated them from the Muslim pre-French population. As a result, by the middle of the twentieth century, Jews identified much more with the French than with the local Muslim population.

This, together with the anti-Semitism that was then grabbing the Arab world, ended up making their continued stay in Algeria impossible, once the country gained its independence from France in 1962 after a protracted war. Within a matter of months, practically all Jews and most other non-Muslims were airlifted out of Algeria. Most of them went to France, a country of which they had the nationality and spoke the language, yet they were culturally very different. A number went to Israel and Canada; very few went to the United States. Because Amsalem’s father worked for the French government, his family went to France and settled in Paris, leaving behind everything they owned. So at age fifteen, Amsalem ended up in a boarding high school in Paris. The integration was difficult due to the heated atmosphere that had surrounded the Algerian war and to the cultural differences, but it was helped by the large number of Jews and Christians who had just left all three North African countries to resettle in France.

After completing high school, college, and graduate school in France, Amsalem came to the United States in 1971 as a student in the MBA program of Columbia University, financed by a scholarship from the French government. He went on to Harvard in 1972 for his doctorate in business administration, financed this time by an American scholarship. While Amsalem was a graduate student at Harvard, he started consulting for the World Bank, which offered to finance his research on technology choice in developing countries and its impact on employment and capital usage. Later on, in 1975, while he was completing his thesis work, the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, offered him a position as economist for the Africa region.

In 1976, Amsalem brought his sister, Annie, who by then had completed her studies in dentistry, to Boston University to do a specialization in periodontics. In 1979, despite being offered a teaching position at Boston University School of Dentistry, she was forced to return to France because of her inability to secure a resident visa. Though she opened a successful practice in Paris, she never gave up on her dream of moving to the United States, and she entered the citizenship lottery faithfully every year.

Amsalem met his soon-to-be wife, Tammy, at the World Bank. The daughter of an American diplomat, she was born in Mexico and grew up in France and the USSR. A mathematician by trade, she worked on the economic forecasting models developed by the World Bank. They married in 1979 and moved to New York, where Amsalem had been offered a position as a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and Tammy enrolled as a graduate student in public health.

The next seven years were spent at Columbia. During that period, Amsalem published a book (MIT Press) and a number of articles and monographs, and he was awarded several prizes for excellence in teaching. Meanwhile, their first child, Arielle, was born, followed, two years later, by their son, David. In 1985 Citicorp asked Amsalem to start its Structured Finance Department. Coming after the 1982 emerging markets debt crisis, the department was to be in charge of developing all of Citibank’s fee-based business in developing countries. Amsalem spent five years at Citibank, which he describes as among the most exciting of his career given the level of creativity, both in the organization and in the market, in trying to solve the damning financial problems then faced by developing countries and investors in these countries.

At the beginning of 1991, at a time when the emerging markets financial crisis was easing and opportunities were growing exponentially, Citibank went into its own financial crisis due to the collapse of the U.S. real estate market. Amsalem then left Citibank with a group of colleagues to start the investment bank for Latin America and Eastern Europe, Banque Indosuez. He moved his family, including his youngest daughter, Judith, born in 1990, first to Paris and then to London, seeing in this move an opportunity to give his children a bilingual and bicultural education.

The same year, after fifteen years, his sister’s tenacity paid off, when she received a letter from the U.S. Immigration Service announcing that she had been selected in the immigration lottery and was granted a residency visa. She immediately sold her practice in France and moved to Boston.

Though successful on their own, the operations of this new investment bank were, by the mid-1990s, seriously impaired by the impact of a deep French real estate crisis. This, together with his desire to give his children, by then bilingual, an American education, led Amsalem to move his family back to New York at the end of 1995.

Upon his return to the United States, Amsalem partnered with venture capitalist Alan Patricof to launch Patricof Emerging Markets. He headed this venture until it was sold together with the other investment banking/merchant banking operations of the Patricof group to Bank of New York in 1999. At that time he also resumed an academic activity, teaching courses in business strategy as an adjunct professor in the Executive MBA program at Columbia University.

Following a short-lived partnership with an old colleague from Bank Indosuez in launching a hedge fund focused on the financing of small and microcap listed companies in the high-technology area, Amsalem launched his own fund in the same field in 2002. He manages this family of funds through their management company, Midsummer Capital, to this date, although he is in the process of passing on this management responsibility to the senior staff working with him.

His three children have given Amsalem a unique perspective on his own immigration, first to France, and finally to the United States. While they all have benefited from their experience living in France and from being bilingual and bicultural, their approach to life is clearly American, and their present status in life is the result of the opportunities offered by this country.

After graduating from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, his daughter Arielle is an Emmy-award-winning film editor of feature-length documentaries and television series; his son, David, is a medical student at Vanderbilt University; and his daughter Judith is a graduate of Cornell University in Environmental Studies and is working for the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C. All three are, by now, trilingual; all three went to Hebrew school in New York; and all three firmly consider themselves to be “American,” though they all share a strong international “bent.”