Beleaguered by growing competition from goods made in China and services produced in India, the United States now has a new worry: the global competition for talent. Americans have long assumed that the world’s best and brightest want to come to the US to study and to work. But today, just when the US needs the best talent to reignite its industrial engine, all that is changing. In a global economy, predicted Robert Hamilton, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in remarks at the Brookings Institution last February, “the best and brightest of the world’s science and engineering students from emerging-market nations like China, India, Russia and Turkey will become an increasingly prized human resource, to be recruited and competed over by developed nations with lower birth rates and decreasing pools of talented young people.”