Group hopes to stem Mexican tech brain drain

Gonzalez said the talent network could help turn Mexico’s brain drain into a “brain gain” as immigrants “who are working in very specialized niches of the global economy will return to our country, if not physically, at least through their ideas and projects.”

Camacho, who heads the program’s pioneering Silicon Valley chapter, says the idea arose during a 2004 meeting between Mexican President Vicente Fox and the chief executive of major chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Hector Ruiz, who was born in Mexico but studied engineering in the United States and went on to build a career there.

Mexico’s government has sponsored conferences for the network, but Camacho says the group is growing more by word of mouth. His Silicon Valley chapter holds regular meetings to share ideas and there are plans for similar groups in other U.S. cities.

The fledgling network holds regular dinner meetings, each with a topic such as how marketing works in the United States, where members can inform each other of job openings, good accountants or contacts with Mexican companies that could help them out with a project.

Once the nonprofit is fully up and running, Camacho plans to solicit corporate memberships and enable high-tech workers to get the same kind of help through the Web site.

“We want to have varying levels of membership: free ones in which people can learn about upcoming speakers or general advice and another level of membership in which we will encourage donations for those looking to log in and see actual job offerings or opportunities for project contracts with companies,” Camacho said.

Gonzalez’s Institute for Mexicans Abroad sponsored a summer conference in Mexico’s capital for 250 high-tech professionals from at home and abroad.

Oscar Rossbach, chief executive officer of Industrias Rossbach, a 120-person company in Mexico City that manufactures microscopes, said he was initially skeptical.

“I thought to myself, ’What the hell am I going to accomplish in a three-day meeting sponsored by the Foreign Relations Department? They’re good for cocktail parties, but the high-tech industry?” Rossbach said. “But I went anyway.”

The result was a meeting with Simon Goldbard, who had started a biotech company in the U.S. and who has helped Rossbach try to tap into the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

“Pharmaceutical companies do not just open the door when you knock,” Rossbach said. “You have to have the right connections. The market is so big, so complex that it would be very difficult for us in Mexico to find our way on our own.”

Rossbach says Goldbard arranged meetings with pharmaceutical companies and helped the Mexican firm navigate U.S. paperwork.

“It is very important to have someone on our side who can think like American people and also like a Mexican person,” Rossbach said.

In what could become the Mexican Talent Network’s first success story, Industrias Rossbach is conducting pilot tests on microscopes for the U.S. market.

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