South Korea's R&D Spending Can't Win the Talent War

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Dear reader, if you follow the news these days, the phrase “talent war” seems to show up almost every other day. The US-China scramble for AI talent, Silicon Valley scientists packing their bags for Europe… but here’s the thing—the real winner of this war isn’t decided by who spends more money.

South Korea spends about 5% of its GDP on R&D—second in the world, right behind Israel. France spends roughly 2.2%, less than half of Korea’s share. And yet right now, scientists around the world are boarding flights to France. Not to Korea.

Today I want to talk about how the landscape of the global talent war is shifting, and where Korea actually stands in it.

The H-1B: From Fuel for Innovation to Political Landmine

This story starts back in 1990. As the Cold War ended and the information technology era dawned, the US created the H-1B visa to pull the world’s best engineers onto American soil. Born out of the Immigration Act of 1990, the visa admitted skilled foreign professionals under an annual cap of 65,000.

The effect was immediate. During the dot-com boom, startups like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft hired globally through H-1B in droves, and Congress even raised the annual cap to 195,000 at one point. The H-1B was, quite literally, Silicon Valley’s fuel.

But the visa’s character gradually began to shift. From the mid-2000s, IT outsourcing firms like Infosys, Tata, and Cognizant emerged as the largest users of H-1B. They used the visa to bring in mid-level technicians from India en masse, effectively displacing American jobs—a far cry from the original intent of a visa for elite talent.

The turning point came in 2016. White workers in the Rust Belt¹ began seeing H-1B as a “job-stealing visa,” and President Trump absorbed that anger politically. By 2025, an executive order had imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applications. A tool of innovation had become a political landmine.

And it wasn’t just visa policy that changed. The Trump administration also slashed federal science budgets. Discussions to cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget—about $48 billion—by nearly 40% moved forward, and elite universities like Columbia and Harvard got caught up in research funding freezes and lawsuits. Cracks began appearing across America’s entire scientific ecosystem.