Something I didn’t mention in today’s piece on the homepage about the less-than-obvious benefits of skilled immigration is that there is no shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workers. My colleagues Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler looked into the issue recently and found, among other things, that there are more than twice as many STEM degree holders as there are STEM workers. What’s more, only one-third of native-born Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree who have a job actually work in a STEM occupation, and nearly one-third of the nation’s STEM workers do not have an undergraduate STEM degree.
Demographer Michael Teitelbaum has a new book out on the multiple wild (and government-created) swings in science education, Falling Behind: Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, that’s relevant to the Chicken Little cries of the tech oligarchs.