Losing Our Edge?

After talking to high-tech entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman felt "a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation." Executives "complained bitterly" that the Department of Homeland Security's stringent visa regulations have forced young foreign talent to give up dreams of working or studying in the US, choosing instead locations in other Western nations. Friedman fears America will lose "its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate." Since fewer foreign students will study in American universities, fewer will take "American ideas and American relationships back home," Friedman writes. "In a decade we will feel that loss in America's standing around the world." America is now fighting two wars: one against Islamist terrorists and the other a "competitiveness-and-innovation struggle" against the new Asian tigers. Friedman blames the Bush administration's fiscal policies for the creeping worries in Silicon Valley: "We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time." – YaleGlobal