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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?"
How about no STEM visas for anyone? Instead, throw the effort at growing these folks at home
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Corporate profits as a share of the economy are at all time lows, and we need to constrain rapacious labor to improve the economy. Sadly, the numbers do not bear this out. Stop giving out indentured servitude, let people stay here on work visas which allow them to change employers, and charge the same price with the same rights as USC/GC. And by the way, the evidence indicates that people are leaving because the American economy is growing sluggishly, and many countries are more attractive to return to because the are democratizing. http://www.nber.org/papers/w18780 But why listen to data when making policy if it gets in the way of lowering wages, throwing people out of jobs, and creating a non-voting class of workers, who cannot protect their rights with political power, against Citizen United empowered super-people?
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I don't see any reason why America needs equality of opportunity for immigrants when it doesn't even have it for its own citizens. Take only the best and do whats best for your country.
The STEM graduates would have created low paying jobs and boosted company profits.
FTFY
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'm not saying that we should necessarily give precedence to immigration applications from STEM candidates; I take exception to the assumptions in the statement I quoted. No country, not even the United States, owes "equality of opportunity" to those who have not yet entered the country. Do we owe the whole world this?
My father came to this country over 50 years ago under the conditions of "what can you do for the U.S." There had to be a recognized need for his skills and someone had to sponsor him. I see no reason for a completely egalitarian lottery. Unless we're going to open the floodgates, it makes sense to pick and choose to some degree.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
It happens all the time in tech. Every hear of a nurse having to train his/her H1B replacement?
The idea of tech visa workers is to lower wages, not because foreign talent is needed. Anybody who works with a lot of H1Bs will tell you, they are generally not exceptional. In fact, most H1Bs are entry level, and only about 7% work at an advanced level.
Stewart?
Here we go again. The supposed shortage of IT workers has been repeatedly shown to be false. While the IT industry has fared much better than most after the Bush depression, to claim that there is a shortage is just plain wrong.
There are thousands of people willing to do the jobs but it is the employers who are the sticking point. They want someone under 30, with 10 or more years of experience in multiple languages, willing to work long hours for average pay.
Article after article I have read all say the same thing: employers admit they are looking for someone with exceptional skills but then go on to admit their wages are not competitive AND they are unwilling to train people.
Only in extreme situations are there shortages of qualified people and those are few and far between. The disconnect between what is available and what HR/employers say they want is the overriding reason for this supposed "shortage".
Until employers get their heads out of their asses and stop whining about how they can't find anyone when they get 200+ resumes for a posting, they can go pound sand.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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
Or we could hire Americans. First, it doesn't steal jobs from Americans. Second, it keeps talented individuals in their home countries instead of leaving their country with fewer skilled workers. That's kinda a big thing in 3rd world countries.
We might as well let the cream of the crop immigrate here and reap the rewards of high paying local jobs.
By contrast, a lot of manual labor is specific to a locale: gardening, cleaning, garbage collection. There's no reason to have able-bodied Americans collecting welfare because illegal aliens take those first jobs on the rung of the economic ladder because taxes and regulations have made them cheaper to employee under the table than to comply with a hose of regulations and taxes for hiring Americans.
Importing brain labor increases the nation's net economic output. hiring illegal aliens that send significant portions of their pay back to Mexico while Americans sit idle decreases the nation's economic output.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I have some...potentially startling... news for you about the efficiency and thoroughness of immigration enforcement procedures worldwide.
This hardly means that the US is at the top of the class; but the only mechanism with a genuinely notable success rate is to be so squalid and miserable at home that nobody even tries to jump the fence...
and by-passes the usually necessary requirement of not being able to find a "local" to do the work and the mandatory language requirements. STEM graduates almost always have special rights over here. In Germany (my current location), the Blue Card scheme is fully implemented ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
But then those undocumented workers started entering the midwest, the economy tanked to 10 years, 9/11, etc and everyone began to freak.
Some of the problems with firms who need technical labor is legitimate. Multinational firms, for example Oil firms, do have a need to transfer people to the US for temporary or long term assignments. Software developers simply trying to use the H1B visa to gain indentured servants is going to interfere with that. Like wise recreation facilities, like ski resorts, simply looking for seasonal labor needs available H1B visas to grant non-US residents short term assignments. Again, firms looking for indentured servants though the H1B visa program interferes with this.
But in a larger sense this about competition. If one works in meat packing plant, one does not want to be competing against someone who will do a days work, instead of the 90% that has become the norm. If one is looking for technical job, it is much harder to compete with a million world wide candidates than 100,000 US candidates.
So to me these are the question. Are we so afraid of the free market and competition that we are going to continue to impose regulations on businesses that say they are not allowed to hire the best candidate possible.? It is clear that most conservative believe we should. The second is are we going to invest in education and training, hold out kids up to the highest standards, and leave behind this idea that we deserve a job just because we were born in the US, and expect people to get out there and hustle instead of sitting back on the sofa waiting for a job to be presented? This is a hard pill to swallow, but the internet ,cheap air travel, and the widespread teaching of english, means that isolation is no longer a viable policy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Kids aren't going into STEM these days because they aren't encouraged, don't see much opportunity, and let's face it, you want to get really rich and successful, STEM isn't the way. US citizens aren't going into STEM (except maybe medicine) because there aren't enough opportunities for them.
Why bust your ass to get a Ph.D. in some science field, do post doc, and eventually in your 40s start making a decent living whereas an MD will have you raking it in by 35?
There just are not that many opportunities to begin with, anyway in science.
Engineering: when a kid sees IBM, Intel, and other big companies moving their R&D overseas WTF are they supposed to think?
And then with these immigrants coming in, it puts further downward pressure on salaries - which is EXACTLY what industry wants. This isn't about lack of talent; this is about messing with supply and demand of labor.
Things have changed dramatically since Tesla, Bell, etc ...
Yes, folks like Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, An Wang, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Bjarne Stroustrup merely took jobs away from native-born Americans instead of creating more opportunities for them.
Oh right! All those tens of thousands of H1-Bs are going to be like them!
There is a misguided perception, here, that immigration is about fairness. It is, in fact, about the benefit a society accrues from accepting the immigrant. You take on another mouth to feed in light of the production you will gain. Wringing hands over the ideal of welcoming all "wretched refuse" is to confuse poetry with reality.
FYI Romney lost....also, government regulates immigration and hands out H1B Visas, sooo...people educated immigrants might actually be beholding to the government that let them in...
(I'm sure being in India does constrain his ability to compete with my technology skills somewhat, but not enough that I can stop worrying about him.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
In fact, most H1Bs are entry level, and only about 7% work at an advanced level.
In fact, 93% of statistics are made up on the spot. As far as the average quality of H1B holders, I've worked with some brilliant H1Bs, and some real idiot H1Bs. Just like among the native-born Americans, the idiots outnumber the geniuses.
You're right about the purpose of those visas, of course, but don't get mad at the H1Bs, who are leaving their home to work because that's the way they can earn as much as possible for their family back home. They're absolutely exploiting the difference between salaries in the US and salaries in other countries, but what they're doing isn't morally any different than someone from leaving Mississippi (average income $31K) and getting work in DC (average income $71K).
I am officially gone from
Everyone(except the courageous souls at VHEMT) wants to defy birth trends:
Across more or less the whole of the first world, birth rates are at or below replacement levels. Even in some of the less fucked 'developing' nations it turns out that 'not breeding like animals until you die' is a fairly popular lifestyle choice among people who have sufficient autonomy and access to medical resources to be able to make it. Shocking, I know.
However, the world isn't exactly overflowing with economic plans for downsizing gracefully. Whether it's an ad-hoc social arrangement(children caring for elderly parents because it's their Filial Duty) or a state administered program(Medicare), most plans for keeping old people from being ground up for soylent green involve having young workers around, ideally in larger numbers than the old people.
Since domestic birth rates make that...problematic... this leads to a certain amount of pressure to keep the working population up by other means.
If we want to go with your (arguably somewhat crass and reductionistic) characterization, it goes like this:
1. Democrats favor immigration because immigrants skew more democratic than wrinkly reactionary old people do.
2. Retiring boomers don't have a whole lot of choice; because their parents fucked like bunnies; but they didn't, so if they want to keep the death panels away, they either need to really squeeze their children, or find a substitute for the ones that they didn't have. They don't have to like it(and many don't); but them's the breaks.
I call them criminals. They are breaking the law after all. Though I probably have a bias, because in my neighborhood you cant even order at bk en ingles. But thats why even us Texas liberals are for heavier border protection. Also the cartels gunning down our assistant DA. Sorry had to fit that in somewhere. But I STILL think STEM visas like H1B1 need to be expanded even! Do you have any idea how many people with tertiary education are immigrants? Its over 55%, and that's too much to just "grow" in one generation. It needs to be done to an extent but gradually. Besides if we can hurt their economy, boost our own, and stand.a better chance at advancing...why not? Using the mobile app, so goodbye to my paragraph formatting.
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.
Yes but this story is not so much race as class. Throw all the blue collar citizens out so foreigners can get their jobs for cheaper? Cool sounds great, after all, they can ALL retrain into tech jobs, right? Do the same to the white collar people and the white collar journalists start whining, mostly. Then you get the stockholm syndrome types where if the blue collar job market has been destroyed then the american thing to do is destroy the white collar job market too.
This "story" is a class story not a race story.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
also to much need degree and passing over tech / trade schools at the same time. Parts of IT need more of a hands on tech / trades setting and the old degree system is a poor fit also CS IS NOT IT.
well the schools are not teaching the skills needed. Some of them are more high level theory others are tech schools that do tech the needed skills but are held down by being tied to the older college system
1) Import a bunch of smart, engineerish types who will undercut the salaries of current engineers in the USA.
2) Leave a bunch of smart, engineerish types in their home countries, where they do the work for $5/hr or less, and who will undercut the salaries of current engineers in the USA.
Like it or not, the first option is probably less damaging to your salary and career, and better for everyone in the USA in the long run.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I suggest a reading of the essay "Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-competitive States" by Col. Ralph Peters (ret.).
The problem arises with those who come from societies that have relatively more corruption than here in the USA. Couple this with the concept that "religion is the essence of culture and culture is the dress of religion" and the result is what we see today. Immigrant entrepreneurs from clan-based cultures will either self-employ or employ only their own kind, thus denying the aforementioned employment opportunities that immigrants were to create.
In the days when Europeans dominated technology, the government came and imposed affirmative action and forced minorities upon them. Now that minorities dominate the sector, the government's silence declares that utopia has been achieved. Those who dominate today with twinkles in their eyes and curls in their lips glibly state "Meritocracy." They know damn well that they use the word as a veneer that barely covers their culture of connectedness which is the wellspring of all corruption. How can one expect a culture of individuality when "all life is connected, every birth is a rebirth, and caste and clan über alles" is the essence of their way of life and their way of life is the dress of "all life is connected, every birth is a rebirth, and caste and clan über alles"?
One may give three cheers for secularism, but the problem is that secularism does not always blind what the eyes see in the mirror and what the mind remembers the association between what is seen in the mirror and the mindset that goes therewith. The law mandates that a man must be taken from the slum, yet that same law forbids that the slum be taken from the man.
The H series is meant to be temporary. Most the applicants for these intend to stay in the US. The H visa leads to grief for employees and abuse by employers.
20% of the Canadian immigration point system is for advanced degrees and a waiting job. I hear it is like that for many other countries too.
Some four million people entered the USA last year with no passports and none of them could speak English. It will take 20 years or more of continuous investment before many of them will even consider holding down a job. Most people are in favor of this. We call those 4,000,000 new-arrivals babies. Most immigrants are the same, except they have passports, some English and can be ecconomically productive in days or weeks. Why the big discrepency in treatment?
Send Justin Bieber and Celine Dion back. Please.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
There is a misguided perception, here, that immigration is about fairness. It is, in fact, about the benefit a society accrues from accepting the immigrant.
Why? "Because I says so".
The reality is that ideas of fairness have a huge impact on many aspects of the world, including immigration. You might try to get all reductionist and say "the bill of rights only happened because we did psychohistory calculations and determined that its net advantages to society outweighed its net disadvantages and societies with a bill of rights tend to prosper more". But that's ridiculous because no such calculations are accurate, and they all are swayed more the author's biases than by fact, and you can paint a much straighter line from authors' moral consciences to end result than you can from pragmatic calculations.
Actually, the Bill of Rights was an outgrowth of the public perception of events surrounding Shays' Rebellion.
The U.S. immigration policy is founded in the principles of Expansionism, which takes as its dictum, "growth is good". On a planet with 7 billion people, there is reason to question that wisdom.
Ideals are worthwhile, but rarely pay the rent, just ask Karl Marx. Policy that is dictated by idealogy most often comes at a very high cost.
Look them up for yourself. 54% of H1Bs are entry level. Only 7% of H1Bs work at an advanced level.
Sorry, but trying to justify amnesty for millions by pointing at 50,000 scientists and engineers is a ruse.
Why bother with stuff like evidence, and logic, when you can use an purely emotional appeal, right?
We bounce STEM graduates out of the country and we make student loans available to people who want to study subjects that will never lead to employment and income that will allow them to repay their student loans, so we create a permanent underclass who will have to work low wage jobs and always be behind in their student loan repayment. Meanwhile, STEM graduate, doctoral, and post doctoral students have to pay 6.5-8.5%, presumably to make up for all the underwater basket weaving dopes who will never be able to repay their loans (why else would a loan that can't be escaped even through bankruptcy cost >2X a home mortgage, considered safe (yeah, sure, youbetcha!)?).
An intelligent approach would be to assess what this country needs and encourage it through immigration and education policies that provide education loans and school grants for STEM and let the underwater basket weavers find their own way to pay for school.
> Throw all the blue collar citizens out so foreigners can get their jobs for cheaper? Cool sounds great, after all, they can ALL retrain into tech jobs, right? Do the same to the white collar people and the white collar journalists start whining
I don't remember Billy Joel writing a song about the plight of IT workers, or Michael Moore making a movie about it.
Techies are seen as spoiled, nobody gives a shit if you stomp on somebody who put his/her self through 5 years of engineering studies.
Let them compete FAIRLY.
If they are just dogs on a leash then that's not good public policy. Our national immigration policy should not be about creating an underclass that can be abused and forced to work for less.
Green cards are OK. H1B Visas are not.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There shouldn't even be a quota for immigrants with a higher education. The idea that we're turning away highly skilled people who *want* to be here is positively insane.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Whatever the rhetoric ("exceptional" or not), we have major inefficiencies arising from restrictive visas on taleneted workers. My non-citizen colleagues in the sciences have had to jump through a thousand hoops to keep working here, and sometimes their education/employment has been disrupted by delays in getting the visa.
This is just reality: highly skilled STEMs are now getting pristine rewards on par with other skilled professionals, like medical doctors, lawyers etc... For this situation to stay this way, STEM should regroup and create their own professional association which requires qualification exams etc... This will ensure that all STEMs are judged on established standard of qualifications and not from some dubious Ph.D. (or else) obtained from lesser known universities (e.g. from China and India). This is not too far stretched. Indeed many companies now are putting coding-exams in their hiring policies because they got burned too frequently. STEMs in managerial positions should hire only STEM professionals that have qualified to the "STEM exams". A very good read: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html "To Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who studies PhD trends, it is "scandalous" that US politicians continue to speak of a PhD shortage. ..."
i should add that there should be some additional provisions. The student visa category could be dropped, or restricted, any student visa holder must pay full price for the education, they must be accepted by a college. They may not recieve any tax funded benefits. They may not recieve financing, for any purpose, from any American bank or institution. Colleges will be required to accept all American applicants before they are allowed to consider any foreign applicant. It would be at discretion of the college whether to accept any foreign applicants after they have approved all American applicants. There would be a lifetime 4 year time limit on the aliens student visa.
We should also create an Immigration and Border General who has authority to through regulation further restrict immigration beyond the restrictions in statute law and has the authority to pass any additional, more strict regulation than under statute law. This General would be directly elected by American voters, and would assure that US immigration laws are properly enforced and the borders are defended. This allows Americans to vote for this officer solely on the immigration issue.
yea the liberal slashdot crowd isn't so liberal when it comes to immigration b/c they fear of perceived competition.
- the country that let's in a million immigrants simply b/c they won a lottery or had a relative sponsor them doesn't complain about that but complains about letting a few 10 thousand highly skilled.
- you want to promote local stem education but won't let in those who want to play on the US side and work in stem therefore promoting it!
hey look, your legal immigrant neighbor has a kid who is good in math. you should deport him somewhere b/c he's your competition. face it, there is a global competition for talent that is globally mobile and have options to go to other countries and not put up with the red-tape of the US. either you play with that new reality or see how far your momentum can take you. the US is quickly becoming just another country.
in my case i've been in the US for 14 years on some non-immigrant visa...from my childhood and into my young adulthood. i'm on PhD level in skills but i don't have many options to be able to stay and work let alone immigrate. there are times when i think like a citizen and see alot of H1B visas going to codemonkeys who have no US experience and got a low-level job when i think the system should select me instead.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
This seems a question of whether it's moral to have an immigration policy. Standard liberal talking points in favour of naturalizing illegals:
1. families should be reunited
2. people who can jump fences and survive in the black market economy are exceptional, and we should want exceptional people
3. we should want a diverse mix of people
4. false comparisons / privileged guilt: you're an immigrant, too. the native americans were here first. etc.
We already have classes of visas to reunite families, merit-based H1B and E1 visas, O1 "alien of extraordinary ability" visas, quotas by nationality and visa lotteries restricted to nations not using much quota, and issues of shifting borders and migration hundreds of years ago don't create the same intellectual paralysis when they happen in Europe, Australia, Africa, etc. You cannot promote these immigration goals until you agree we should _have_ an immigration policy, which is the opposite of normalizing illegals.
If you think immigration is too low, or the immigrant experience is wastefully stressful for the immigrant, or overuse of huge fees (>$10k) for despamming, too little priority is given to telling people yes/no early in their life so they are not waiting in queues while their productive years are spent elsewhere, or there is too little temporary freedom given to young people to fully explore where they'd like to base their life, or too little cooperation with universities, or too much subjectivity and arbitraryness and border-guard discretion in the process, or too much overzealous retribution to minor infractions, I agree with all that. Most other industrialized countries seem to have smarter policies and implement them much better.
It infuriates me we're talking about illegals instead of these problems. We're just not a global player any more. We're debating whether or not we want to join an unprecedented race to the bottom that no other country has done based on silly soundbites like "it's not illegal to wish for a better life just because you're illegal." ffffffuuuuuuuuu!
An H1B is not so much a visa into the USA as an actual passport to the nation of H1. The citizens of H1s have wandered far from their place of birth but eventually will win a homeland of their own, perhaps even their own planet, where they can live in peace and ignore the phone calls asking how to fix everything.
Nullius in verba
I'd rather have an entry-level H1B here, earning and spending money in the US (and paying taxes), than to have the same guy over in India or wherever.
(I'm sure being in India does constrain his ability to compete with my technology skills somewhat, but not enough that I can stop worrying about him.)
Since most H1-B's are entry level, not "advanced" workers at all, and we have millions of fresh grads chomping at the bit for the few entry level positions available, what sense does it make to then import people to drive down wages and increase competition for a group that can barely get employed in the first place?
Who did what now?
Emma Lazarus did us a huge disservice when she wrote "Give me... the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," because now leftists think it's noble to recruit unskilled immigrants. But this is not the 18th century, when infrastructure was being expanded like crazy and there was huge demand for anyone able to pound in a railroad spike. It's not noble. All you end up with is a nation full of wretched refuse.
Harvard is a highly selective institution. Can you imagine what would happen to its reputation and status if it started allowing high-school dropouts to matriculate? For some strange reason, leftists aren't urging Harvard to accept wretched refuse, the way they are urging their country to do so.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Why? "Because I says so".
Would you restrict a person from immigrating due to their criminal record? (Let's say it's murder, to make the choice simple)
If you would restrict that case, then you're already doing the cost-benefit analysis. Other people are just using a higher threshold than you are.
The article is also pretty bad to conflate illegal ("undocumented") immigration with legal immigration. There should be no debate about whether we should enforce the law.
I'd support laxer immigration laws if someone makes the case for it; but amnesty for those who broke the rules is a giant FU to every legal immigrant who jumped through every hoop.
theodp wrote, "should Gutierrez cede to Wadhwa's techies-before-Latinos proposal?"
I can't believe theodb equated being Latino with being unskilled! I know several highly-skilled Latinos who would object to that. I object to that.
But if you want to rephrase the statement by removing the unfortunate ethnic slur: "should highly-skilled immigrants receive preference over unskilled immigrants," I would agree wholeheartedly. The last thing this economy needs is more unskilled immigrants.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Except that Mississippi and DC are in the same country. The US government has far more obligations to its own citizens and residents than to foreigners. This does not mean to discriminate against foreigners, and it does not mean to keep them all out if they have job skills that do not exist here. However too many H1B visas are granted to people when we have residents here with the same skills who are looking for jobs. The H1B program is absolutely being used to get cheap labor.
The college system is fine. We need more workers with good understanding of the fields, but we have too many people trying to get tech-school level shortcuts, or even less. I see some of these H1B workers who are lousy with their skills and unable to adapt to changing technologies or changing work requirements.
Ya, too many people seem to think that IT is the only field in existence. IT is a service field that can get away with tech school grads. Other STEM jobs however need people with good education and experience. I have seem IT jobs over the decades go from being somethign that needs adaptability and flexibility and willingness to work with clients and users into being a bunch of interchangeable cogs being run by executives who insist of technologies that allow interchangeable cogs that can be filled by people who present the right training certificates.
Actually, maybe not...A lot of the H1Bs I work with send a substantial portion of their checks back to families in other countries. While the tax revenue is great I guess, the loss of 1000-2000$ a month out of our local economy is not so good.
That’s a generalization, so your mileage may vary.
Hmmm... Fairfax? Stafford?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
OK, so, I'll admit that the simple fact that the job-crash following the massive increase in STEM immigrants circa 1995 to 2002 doesn't prove that increasing STEM immigration damages the economy, but by the same token it can hardly be taken as evidence for the relentlessly argued position that STEM immigrants create more jobs than they take.
Seastead this.
That's cute but your analogy misses several important points.
1: That H1B worker will with near absolute certainty return to India. Only now they have an impressive resume thanks to their time here.
2: That one worker will potentially be used to depress wages for hundreds of other workers depending on where they are hired and for what position.
3: You haven't tried to factor the opposite, to see whether or not someone American could've filled that job and what that would've done for the economy instead.
The point is the benefits you figure are there, are largely not, and the costs you don't even bother to state. Let alone figuring out at all whether the latter scenario would've resulted in a net economic gain had an H1B worker not been hired.
The problem is that employers don't want to train employees and expect potential hires to get the training and experience they need for the job on their own time and dime. That's basically what the parent's post boils down to.
Wadhwa's proposal is "smart foreign students graduating with STEM degrees from U.S. universities" before "randomly selected high-school graduates from abroad." Yes, high-school graduates are relatively unskilled, compared to smart people with STEM degrees. Never once did Wadhwa bring up a specific ethnicity. theodp keeps injecting ethnicity.
To say that Wadhwa's proposal "boils down to techies-before-Latinos" is to say that Latino culture produces far fewer smart people with STEM degrees than other cultures. (To whatever extent that this is true, it's not the fault of the U.S., and the U.S. has no obligation to try to remedy the deficiencies of cultures outside of its borders.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, the American who manages to think his country is the greatest in the history of the world while at the same time harboring a massive insecurity complex.
If Bumbfuckistan wants to import highly trained labor at the expense of their own citizens, is that your problem? Do you have a say in the immigration policy in Bumbfuckistan? No? Then why are you comparing it to the United States where you are impacted by policies enacted by your elected Representatives?