FP article today mentioned that: 

China is getting a major boost from the return home of Western-educated, skilled workers. They are returning because of frustrations with U.S. visa policies that make it extremely difficult for skilled workers from high-population countries to obtain permanent-resident visas; because of opportunities back home; and because the Chinese government is offering huge incentives to engineers and scientists. These returnees are teaching locals how to build world-class companies and how to innovate. In almost every high-growth tech company in China, you find returnees in senior management positions. In scientific research, top research labs have returnees in lead positions. And these scientists are beginning to make breakthroughs.

In short, the article suggests that these migrants return because of (frustrating) US naturalization policies, job market incentives back home, and active government recruiting policies.

KATE BALDWIN and JOHN D. HUBER (2010). Economic versus Cultural Differences: Forms of Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision. American Political Science Review, 104, pp 644-662.

Arguments about how ethnic diversity affects governance typically posit that groups differ from each other in substantively important ways and that these differences make effective governance more difficult. But existing cross-national empirical tests typically use measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) that have no information about substantive differences between groups. This article examines two important ways that groups differ from each other—culturally and economically—and assesses how such differences affect public goods provision. Across 46 countries, the analysis compares existing measures of cultural differences with a new measure that captures economic differences between groups: between-group inequality (BGI). We show that ELF, cultural fractionalization (CF), and BGI measure different things, and that the choice between them has an important impact on our understanding of which countries are most ethnically diverse. Furthermore, empirical tests reveal that BGI has a large, robust, and negative relationship with public goods provision, whereas CF, ELF, and overall inequality do not.

A new RAND study of captured documents from Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) reveals some interesting facts about the organization. It found that “AQI was a hierarchical organization with decentralized decision making; AQI in Anbar was profitable enough to send substantial revenues out of the province in 2006; AQI relied on extortion, theft, and black market sales to fund its operations in Anbar; AQI needed large, regular revenue sources to fund its operations, but its administrative leaders did not hold much cash on hand.”  Significantly, the study found that “disrupting AQI’s financial flows could disrupt the pace of their attacks.”  

HT: Freakonomics