The United States needs to fix its immigration laws to prevent a brain drain of top space and cyber experts from leaving the country, a top lawmaker said yesterday.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said immigration law encouraging top minds to leave the United States is a big hurdle to reinvesting in space and cyber.
“In the U.S., we have some of the best minds in the world come to our colleges, but because of our immigration laws, if you come to the U.S. and you go to college, as soon as you are finished you have to go back to your country,” Ruppersberger said yesterday at a symposium hosted by the International Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
Ruppersberger said the United States is going to have to form joint relationships to share cyber experts because U.S. immigration law is sending some of those bright foreign minds home.
“These individuals are very smart and very intelligent and want education and to continue with their careers,” Ruppersberger said. “They don’t worry about the U.S., they just want to continue with research and development, and if another country can provide that, that’s where they are going to go.”
Ruppersberger reiterated support for his bill, co-authored with House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Michael Rogers (R-Mich.), which would improve the federal government’s sharing of classified cyber threat information with approved American companies. The bill would also make it easier to share cyber threat information with other companies in the private sector and enable the private sector to share information with the government on a voluntary basis (Defense Daily, Dec. 2).
Ruppersberger referred to cyber threat information as the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “secret sauce.”
“So what we need to do is change the law to allow NSA to give information about these attacks to providers, so the providers can then act to protect their customers,” Ruppersberger said. “Their customers may be a major defense contractor or a senior citizen in South Dakota.”
The bill, H.R. 3523, is also known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011.