It’s not just poor and uneducated Mexicans who move to U.S.

If Donald Trump thinks all Mexican migrants are criminals, it’s because he hasn’t met the likes of Pablo Meyer, a computational biologist, or Enrico Ramirez Ruiz, an astrophysicist.

They are two of the thousands of Mexicans with doctorates who’ve left their homeland, mostly for the United States, in a brain drain that saps Mexican academia of super-hot minds.

Some of them sought jobs in Mexico and couldn’t find them, securing slots instead on the faculties of U.S. universities. Others long to return. Still others did come back, only to get fed up with bureaucracy or disgusted by crime and return to the United States, where academia and industry recognize talent without regard to citizenship.

It’s the flip side of presidential candidate Trump’s calls for higher border walls to keep Mexican immigrants out. Highly skilled Mexicans also travel north and are met with open arms. By one estimate, 11,000 Mexicans with doctoral degrees reside and work in the United States. Another estimate says 27 percent of all Mexicans who hold such degrees work north of the border.

The United States reaps clear benefit from such an exodus.

“Americans are free riders in terms of Mexican brains,” said Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, a Mexican historian at the University of Chicago who got his master’s and doctorate at Stanford University.

One of those brains resides in the head of Pablo Meyer, 38, whose academic path led him from Mexico to France and on to Rockefeller University in New York City, where he got a doctorate delving into the mysteries of gene sequencing. His doctorate in hand, Meyer arrived back in Mexico to look for a job. He went to the National Medicine and Genomics Institute, the Institute of Cellular Physiology and to the Center for Research and Advanced Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute.

“There were no open positions,” Meyer recalled. “Older people were not retiring and there was no funding for new positions.”

Recognizing Meyer’s sharp intellect, the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, part of IBM Research, hired him for a research position at its lab in Yorktown, N.Y., where he studies metabolic networks and is part of a team with a patent pending.

With parents and siblings back in Mexico, Meyer still harbors dreams of his homeland but also anger at what he considers an incoherent policy toward science.

“I’m bitter because I love Mexico,” Meyer said. “It’s just a feeling of a lack of vision in the science field. There’s not a clear political will for it.”

Enrico Ramirez Ruiz has dreams, too, but of a different sort. An astrophysicist, Ramirez, 39, passed through the doors of Cambridge and Princeton universities, and now teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He’s the youngest person ever elected to the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Ramirez dreams that Mexico may reap more Nobel Prizes in science beyond the 1995 prize in chemistry won by Mario Molina, a chemist.

Rather than “brain drain,” Ramirez favors the terminology of “brain circulation.” He puts into practice what he preaches. He mentors Mexican graduate students, nurturing them at the Santa Cruz campus and on trips to Mexico, traveling often. Currently, his group comprises three post-doctoral students and three other graduate students, all astronomers.

“We want to generate the next Nobel Prizes,” Ramirez said, without a trace of immodesty, “but Nobel Prizes who work in Mexico.”

That’s the hard part – getting jobs, equipping laboratories and keeping scholars in Mexico.

This story was originally published August 21, 2015 at 2:41 PM with the headline "It’s not just poor and uneducated Mexicans who move to U.S.."