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In this week’s presidential debate both Mitt Romney and President Obama acknowledged that the U.S. was a nation of immigrants and that the door was still wide open—provided you were coming with a marketable skill. That’s nothing new. Highly skilled, educated immigrants from developing countries have almost always been welcomed by the rich developed world. But what is now changing is that countries that were once losers in the “brain drain” have suddenly become gainers.
The Pulitzer Center has teamed up with Christian Science Monitor correspondents Sara Miller Llana, Peter Ford and Robert Marquand to report on how countries like China, Brazil and Poland—once exporters of their best and brightest—are now luring some of those emigrants back home. Not only that, some of these countries have also become magnets for talented young professionals from the European Union who say they see more opportunity in the developing world. The full story, “Brain Gain,” is featured on the cover of the current issue of The Monitor Weekly. The online version will be available on Sunday.
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Tahrir Square may be the most politically significant piece of real estate in Egypt, but it is not the only place where the momentous changes now sweeping the country are played out. Pulitzer Center grantee Lauren Bohn is traveling beyond Cairo’s famous square to parts of Egypt rarely visited by foreign journalists. She is seeking out the voices of what she calls Egypt’s “silent majority.” This week, in a Daily Beast dispatch from Qena, a dusty river town on the upper Nile, Lauren reports on efforts by young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs to forge a new path through the thickets of Egypt’s moribund economy.
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As you may remember from last week's newsletter, today we are celebrating the National Day on Writing. Help us celebrate with The New York Times Learning Network and the National Writing Project in the #WhatIWrite Tweet-up. We're inviting students, journalists, Pulitzer Center alumni—everybody—to join in by telling us what you write and (if you choose) adding a link. Find the full instructions here. Check our blog next week to see the photo mash-up of the entries.
Until next week,
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor