I had today a meeting with the group of the Gramene research project at Cornell University. The head of the group Panka Jaiswal is from India. The other group members I met were from Taiwan, China and Eritrea, no US American.
I know, there are many people who take this as a weakness of the US American System. The research is based on the presence of PhD Students and Postdocs especially from Asian countries. You can see this also as an expression of the strenghts of the American system. It has still enough softpower to attract the talented people from all over the world.
For coming to Italy, you must be really desperate, or crazy.