Jennifer Wedel (an “avid Republican”!) got the drop on President Obama the other day by asking him why, with so many American engineers like her husband unemployed, he wants to import even more engineers from abroad. Obama responded that industry tells him there’s a “huge demand” for engineers around the country, and that she should send her husband’s résumé to the White House.
The Republican National Committee has leapt at the opportunity, launching a site called Not Better Off, highlighting the weak job market during the president’s tenure and urging people to send him their résumés.
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It’s a nimble political response, but there’s one problem: The Republicans also want to import cheap foreign labor for tech companies. The Bloomberg/Murdoch group Partnership for a New American Economy (a/k/a “Billionaires for Open Borders”) ran an ad in South Carolina showing that every GOP presidential candidate wants increases in “skilled” immigration, concluding that “there’s really no debate . . . America needs high-skilled immigrants to create new jobs and grow our economy.”
Actually, there is debate. And the crux of the debate is the question, how skilled is “high-skilled”? Where do we draw the line? At a bachelor’s degree in a “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field? Master’s? Ph.D.?
The discussion has focused on this because the tech industry has shifted some of its lobbying money from the customary push for increases in the H-1B visa (ostensibly a program to import temporary labor) to new proposals to automatically give a permanent green card to any foreign student receiving a degree in the U.S. in a technical field. This is commonly referred to as the “staple a green card to the diploma” approach, and is found in a number of bills or proposals, such as the “Staple Act” and the “Brain Act.” The issue being considered by lawmakers, then, is which diplomas to staple green cards to.
There’s not much of a push to give special immigration access to foreigners receiving bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields because there’s nothing particularly special or “high-skilled” about them. Don’t take my word for it; Darla Whitaker, the head of human resources for Texas Instruments, told Congress last fall that TI doesn’t sponsor foreign students with bachelor’s degrees for green cards or “temporary” H-1B visas because they don’t need to — there are plenty of American students getting bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields.
What’s more, my colleague Steven Camarota has calculated from Census Bureau data that in 2010 there were 1.8 million working-age, native-born Americans with bachelor’s degrees in engineering who were unemployed, no longer in the labor force, or working in fields besides engineering. That’s not all technical fields, mind you, just engineering.
At the other end of the skill spectrum, there’s little need for such a program, since pretty much all foreign Ph.D. recipients who want to stay end up staying already. A new report from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (on the campus of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made famous by the Manhattan Project) shows that nearly two-thirds of all foreigners on temporary visas who received science doctorates in 2004 were still here in 2009. That figure is actually held down by low stay rates of people from developed countries, who have more interest in returning home; the figures for China and India, two of the three top source countries, were 89 percent and 79 percent, respectively.
As a twenty year software developer (what used to be called a "computer programmer"), I can attest to first hand knowledge of the H-1B issue. Most H-1Bers are from India and China and most use it merely as another form of immigration, that is permanance. To put it another way, they rarely go home at the end of their H-1B visa time limit. As soon as they get here, they begin to "work the system" to bring their entire extended family to our country.
Furthermore, most H-1Bers are just like native born developers - some are great, some are poor and most are average. Do they supress wages/salaries? Yes I think some but not because they work for peanuts but rather because their presence floods the labor market and makes the availability of developers that much easier and routine for employers to find.
All in all, H-1B visas should be scaled back, just like all of immigration should be scaled back. Will it? No way, the political class, the business world, academia and the MSM are too wrapped up in the notion of open borders, trans-nationalism, "we're a nation of immigrants" half-truths and the like. Fergit about it.
"Furthermore, most H-1Bers are just like native born developers - some are great, some are poor and most are average."
Just wanted to say thanks for saying this. I'm so tired of hearing the "world's best and brightest" defense of increasing immigration. Even if it weren't insulting, it's patently false, as everyone who has experience in the field knows.
Agreed. As Mark Krikorian himself has written about the supposed whiz kids whom we're importing:
"People imagine that's 'Einstein immigration,' the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop, yada, yada, yada. Well, there's some of that, but it's mainly a 'bunch of B students from Hyderabad Community College.'"
Mark Krikorian's rational and coherent argument here indicates just how totally pathetic the Presidential candidates are. Technologist immigration has nothing to do with Conservative versus Liberal ideology. It has everything to do with the Crony Capitalists who want a cheaper, more compliant workforce.
OBTW, and also younger. As senior American scientists and engineers are fired and replaced by younger, cheaper immigrants in downsizing swap-outs.
Shallow political hacks like Obama and Romney call for American students to study science and engineering on one hand, yet advocate immigration policies that are major disincentives for those students to do just that. It's not that those policies are so incongruous, it's that the Candidate-Clowns don't even realize that they are incongruous!
Nobody should sell short the actual mediocrity of the Presidential field. None of them seem to understand the concept of unintended consequences or can connect policy dots in an end to end way. That cognitive limitation is huge.
And it's real and it's the reason why one of that motley crew is going to oversee an American collapse before 2016. America is hosed...
"Shallow political hacks like Obama and Romney call for American students to study science and engineering on one hand, yet advocate immigration policies that are major disincentives for those students to do just that."
I've made this comment before, but I can't resist: A few years back I was in a professional organzation for computer geek-types. They had a weekly news digest. I still remember one issue where the lead story was about Microsoft lobbying for more foreign visas because colleges just weren't producing enough computer scientists and engineers anymore. The next story was a report on a survey about why college students weren't going into CS and EE anymore. The overwhelming number one answer was that all those jobs were going overseas and they didn't want to sweat through four years of some of the toughest programs a college offers, just to get out with no job. SteveM has it right.
Mark,
Why dont you include the checks and control measures that the bills include ? Including that of NSF - National science foundation, having the ability to control and choose which of the grad students will be getting a greeen card. and since NSF will also hold the purse on the money that comes in from the H1b, i think its a fantastic/rational decision.
There are supposed to be protections already in our immigration laws. How well are those working out? Obama is refusing to deport illegal aliens on the basis that they're "Dream Act eligible"--even though the Dream Act has failed to pass for the past 11 years. He's ordered the DOJ to "review" deportations for 300,000 illegal aliens with an eye to giving them stays of deportation and work permits. And he's now talking about doing an end run around the intent of Congress and allowing illegal aliens to remain in this country to apply for hardship waivers, rather than requiring them to self-deport to their homelands to wait for the outcome of the application. Fact is, we can bet any so called "checks and control measures" will be used or ignored for political reasons, most likely to benefit employers.
Great idea, we'll force the best and the brightest to go work for someone else.
Like most of the solutions proposed by the neo-isolationists, they sound good on paper, but in the long run are poison.
These guys actually think that if we don't let them work here, the settle for working in some rice paddy somewhere.
The reality is that there hundreds of companies around the world who are eager to hire such people, and will. They will then use these people to build products that compete against US products. Both here in the US, and in markets around the world.
If you guys want to ensure that the US becomes and remains an economic backwater in the 21st century and beyond, go on, continue to demonize anyone who's ancestors haven't been here at least 100 years.
If you didn't understand the economic reasons behind this article--which you clearly didn't--don't go biting at the ankles of the rest of us who did.
Give it another try--like an adult and with facts--and I'll be all ears. In the meantime, a few points:
1 - There are "best and brightest" among US citizens. The article clearly pointed out a proposal whose *explicit* goal was to depress their wages through labor-supply inflation (nothing less than diabolical, I thought). Did you get to that part? Is that what you want?
2 - If there are hundreds of companies around the world eager to hire foreign workers, let them. The reason for hiring someone should be improving a company's human capital, not depressing wages. US companies have access to those workers too--and have had for as long as I've been paying attention--without any need for automatic-visa programs (see my next points).
3 - An H1-B visa is extremely easy for a company to obtain; however, it locks you, the employee, into a low-paying bracket, since the company giving it to you knows it has you by the proverbials--lose your job, lose your right to stay, so put up. How do I know? I've been an H1-B holder. And neither I nor the other H1-B holders were particularly exceptional at our job--we were just cheaper than our US counterparts, until we either went home or acquired new skills that made us more competitive. We put up with the lower salary knowing that part of the deal was the privilege (not the right) to stay in the US. So, it's often not the quest for the "best and brightest" that pushes a company to petition for a visa--it is the desire to skimp on salaries.
4 - Green cards *are* issued to the "best and brightest"--not through another automatic, one-size-fits-all centralized policy, but through the companies who want these talented individuals. It is a fairly easy process, but the somewhat higher barrier than for an H1-B ensures that a) the company truly wants the individual and that b) a priority is given to similarly-qualified US citizens. From what I know, this process is working just fine. If not, why not?
5 - There are (last time I counted) about 20 temporary working programs, covering anything from asylum-seekers to athletes, from tomato pickers to brain surgeons, from au-pairs to engineers and CEOs. Are you aware of this? How is this so sorely insufficient as to merit *automatic* permanent residence to holders of certain degrees?
So, which of these points do you disagree with, and why? Are you objecting on liberal grounds (in which case you should recoil at the NSF memo cited in the article), on libertarian grounds (in which case you should welcome worldwide competition for jobs--which invalidates your third paragraph), or just on a self-congratulatory whim?
Another predictable, stunningly ignorant comment from MarkW, who ignores all the data and spouts the cliches about "best and the brightest" and "rice paddys" we see ad nauseum.
Hey buddy, do a little reseach and you'll see how, as pointed out in another comments here and Krikorian's column, that these imported workers are far from the "best and brightest." In fact they are quite average, and primarily used as a form of cheap, imported labor.
I see this every day in the aerospace and tech industry in So Cal, including from my friend from India here on a work visa, who openly admits it.
I love the way the nativists assume that everyone who isn't an american is stupid.
They also assume that anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid.
Finally, they assume that they somehow have a right to the job of their dreams and that somehow if ony we passed enough laws, this right could be fulfilled.
Got news you, yea of ignorant pronouncements, those foreigh workers are going to depress your wages, regardless of whether they work here, or work for a foreign company somewhere else.
I love the way the nativists assume that everyone who isn't an american is stupid.
I don't see any nativists here, so your comment, on the face of it, doesn't apply here. But, I assume you mean the people who disagree with you, so, moving on: Not one person here has assumed that non-Americans are stupid. People are saying, quite rightly, that the level of talent in foreign hires just really isn't different than the level of talent in the US. That's all. Further, most people here are not assuming that; they are speaking from their own experience.
They also assume that anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid.
No, they aren't assuming that either. They have facts in hand that lead them to one conclusion, and they see someone else utterly confident in an opposite conclusion that flies in the face of all data, adn tehy firgure, well, you know ....
Finally, they assume that they somehow have a right to the job of their dreams and that somehow if ony we passed enough laws, this right could be fulfilled.
Funny, but I haven't seen that one here either. Alot of people rightly think that, being citizens here, they have a right to be in line for whatever jobs are available ahead of any foreigners who don't have demonstrably superior skills. For the life of me, I don't see what's wrong with that. And, yeah, controlling immigration is one thing the government should be able to do.
Bottom line: "The world's best and brightest" line is a big red herring. We have over maybe 230 million people in this country with STEM degrees. Many are out of work. You simply cannot argue that "the world's best and brightest" can't be found among them.
OK, before I get trashed on this, we don't have 230 million STEMers. I apparently posted this in between revisions. Sorry. But we do have over 20 million. And my main point still stands.
MarkW's post is Exhibit A: If you can't factually or logically respond to an argument, call the person a "nativist" or other bad names. Right out of Harry Reid's and the left's playbook.
@ Tech Guy--good comments, and thanks for the heads-up about MarkW (confirmed, on cue, by his last comment--see below). He now joins MikeB, Humpty Dumpty and a couple others on my "Do-Not-Bother" troll list.
We have heard this argument for at least the past 20 or so years, "give us more H1-B visas so we can get more foreign engineers to help our tech industry". When will this charade be exposed for what it is - a political threat by tech's titans to keep the cost of its engineering talent low. Instead of stifling wages for engineers in the tech field (a field by the way with enormous returns on invested capital, much greater than the oil industry for example), why not increase their taxes? Why not tax the wealth of the privileged few who've made billions off of monopolistic business practices? Why not just raise the darn salaries of US engineers and sponsor MORE scholarships for US students than helping out China et al?
This entire issue is a canard, made up by the tech industry. It should be more thoroughly reviewed, and, if warranted, direct US efforts to US citizens first and foremost!! NOT to foreign students. If they do, then I suggest that perhaps the labor we should consider importing is executive talent to better run the companies we have here. Same rationale exists for illegal immigration at the unskilled lower end of the labor scale. If it didn't happen, business might have to pay waiters, dishwashers more than $2.00 or so an hour. And maybe, high school kids could find a job. Maybe inner city kids could work rather than getting involved with gangs, crime, etc. Maybe if we really just let labor markets work and NOT support the illegalities and special preferences the government so woefully messes up, just maybe our unemployment problem wouldn't be so bad.
As a retired Intel software engineer I'm more than fed up with the constant Silicon Valley clamor for more H1-B's. Whether the Silicon Valley unemployment rate is 1% or 13% they are always begging for more foreign 'talent'.
I explicitly remember Hewlett-Packard execs during the dot-com crash lobbying Congress for more H1-Bs while HP was announcing layoffs of 10,000 STEM workers and Carly Fiorina was sneering that 'no American has a right to a job'.
Foreign-worker fetishists cite the fact that more than half of STEM grad students are foreign, so they need to be given green cards. Why is that situation taken as a given?
Is there a shortage of minimally-eligible citizens applying to STEM grad schools? Or are they getting rejected in favor of foreigners to sate US academia's diversity fetish?
This morning, I was reading that public universities in Washington State are favoring admittance of foreign students, especially those from China, over residents of the state BECAUSE THE FOREIGN STUDENTS ARE PAYING A MUCH HIGHER TUITION RATE OF ALMOST $29,000. The same is true in other states and for other nationalities. These are not the "best and the brightest" either, necessarily. I've taught in the Middle East and at a school I taught at here, the head of International Student Affairs asked me to use my contacts overseas to identify foreign students who could and would pay to go to school here. Knowledge of English no problem--if they did poorly on the TOEFL, accommodations would be made. Education is big business these days.
The "accommodations" often involve admitting the students to the university's intensive English program (IEP) first, until they are able to "pass" the TOEFL. This is actually a good thing, for the students in that they actually improve their English before starting their academic studies, and for the university, in that the IEP brings in even more money (probably about the same price as regular tuition, but paid to faculty with master's degrees at most). It also keeps the language ability of the students at a reasonable level once they actually enter the university.
