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Should Techies Trump All Others In Immigration Reform?
theodp writes "In an open letter on TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa calls on Congressman Luis Gutierrez to lift his 'hold on Silicon Valley' and stop tying immigration reform for highly-skilled STEM immigrants to the plight of undocumented immigrants. So, why should the STEM set get first dibs? 'The issues of high-skilled and undocumented immigrants are both equally important,' says Wadhwa, but 'the difference is that the skilled workers have mobility and are in great demand all over the world. They are getting frustrated and are leaving in droves.' Commenting on Gutierrez's voting record, Wadhwa adds, 'I would have voted for visas for 50,000 smart foreign students graduating with STEM degrees from U.S. universities over bringing in 55,000 randomly selected high-school graduates from abroad. The STEM graduates would have created jobs and boosted our economy. The lottery winners will come to the U.S. with high hopes, but will face certain unemployment and misery because of our weak economy.' So, should Gutierrez cede to Wadhwa's techies-before-Latinos proposal, or would this be an example of the paradox of virtuous meritocracy undermining equality of opportunity?"
Wants highly trained, highly skilled people when immigrating. Try to immigrate to Mexico. If you are a fruit picker, you aren't going to be able to. IT person with a great skillset? Your likelihood of being let in greatly improves.
But yes, lets bash America for wanting the same thing every other country does when allowing people to immigrate, some standards.
I'm all for increasing STEM graduates in the USA. But according to this article there were 600,000 unfilled STEM jobs in the USA last year, and 300,000 unemployed STEM workers ("only one unemployed STEM worker for two unfilled STEM jobs throughout the country"- not finding one of those 600k jobs due to mismatched skill sets). This does include skilled blue-collar jobs. Even if a decent STEM education program were implemented now, and enough students entered it, it would be several years before they were ready to enter the workforce. Those jobs are there now. If there were a surplus of STEM workers in the USA, or even close to it, then there's no way we should be importing thousands of foreign STEM workers- but that doesn't seem to be the case.
How about no STEM visas for anyone? Instead, throw the effort at growing these folks at home
Could the mod who moderated "flamebait" on this please anonymously post justification? We have 20 million unemployed, many of them techies over 40 who can't get a call back because the employer prefers cheaper (pronounced "younger") people who don't have as many family complications and the expectations of good benefits (like health insurance and pension/401k match.)
It seems to me that it is a perfectly legitimate point of view, and not an invitation to flaming, that we shouldn't be importing something we already have a supply of (and the capacity to generate more of) just to depress wages. Part of the problem is the attitude that an employee must either have the sun, moon, and stars (and often in quantities that don't jive with reality--i.e. a demand for 15 years of .Net experience, for example) to earn a competitive salary (i.e. one that would entice you to leave your current job) or be willing to work so cheaply that the employer would be foolish not to pay for a little training to "catch them up" on the job.
Who did what now?
And within the country, allowing in skilled migrants promotes equality by increasing competition at the top of the wage scale. Dean Baker included this as one of the ways that the upper classes protect themselves (competition for thee, not for me) http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cns.html#2 Anyway, as a knowledge worker, I'm totally comfortable with inviting more "competitors" because I actually think of them as "colleagues". I think that their presence will increase the productivity of native knowledge workers sufficiently to compensate for any loss due to competition.