White House Petition To Let Foreign STEM Grads Work Longer In US Hits 100K Signatures

theodp writes: Computerworld reports that a petition urging the White House to act urgently on a court ruling that could force thousands of recent foreign STEM graduates working in the U.S. on OPT STEM extensions to leave the States early next year reached 100,000 signatures Tuesday, the threshold for an official government response. It could present a political conundrum of sorts for the Obama administration. Because the administration didn't act to protect U.S. workers at Southern California Edison and Disney, explained an attorney in the case, "now that foreign workers will be losing their jobs, how would it look if Obama went into overdrive to protect their jobs?" By the way, using a map to gauge whether support for the petition comes from all over the country (as the White House suggests), indicates that support for the OPT STEM Extension petition is largely concentrated in tech hotspots and universities, including off-the-beaten-path college towns that host large international student populations.

Comments

Doesn't Matter

[Psychotic_Wrath]

If you look at the responses on Whitehouse.gov then you villl see that the responses are all pretty lame and meaningless. This is when they even choose to respond. Many times they simply say they wont bother responding. The petitions simply get a response that you would expect when calling a call center in India for customer service. Nothing ever changes or happens from a petition.

Won't go anywhere

[Fire_Wraith]

First, this isn't the same as the H-1B issue. This would actually be a better solution if we were facing a shortage of skilled workers, because more trained entry level sorts would directly address that. The problem is, the tech moguls pushing for H-1Bs don't really care about that, they just want cheaper workers. The fact that most H-1Bs are used not to bring in highly paid experts in their field, but instead to bring in contract workers for IT sweatshops, should tell you something. That, and the fact that H-1Bs are largely stuck in their one job, are part of why this solution will likely not have any tech moguls or the like pushing for it.

I do find it disingenuous that the lawyer quoted conflates the two though. Entry level types who happen to be foreign graduates of a US university aren't going to be competing for any jobs that aren't already at risk of being given to any US-born graduates (which is a problem in Tech, but is a rather different one). That said, the Obama administration (and politicians in general) ought to be doing a lot more to crack down on the H-1B fuckery, just in general, nevermind in relation to a broader immigration overhaul.

Re:UNAMERICAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Collectively, immigrants -both legal and illegal- send tens of billions of dollars back to their respective countries every year, removing that currency from US markets. How again is that a "good deal" for the US economy? Besides, according to Pew research, North American nations are already more welcoming than European ones: http://www.pewglobal.org/2007/...

Re:UNAMERICAN

[evilviper]

Oh yes, it is so un-American to accept the world's tired, poor, huddled masses.

I'd be happy to support visa for these folks, but NOT H-1Bs or similar. If we need them, bring them in and give them full rights. If we don't need them that badly, we don't really need them.

So many of the world's college educated workers want to leave their home economy and improve ours instead.

Coming here and working at below-market rates *does* technically "improve our economy*, as the investors get to make a bit more money off of them, but not in a positive way (driving down skilled middle-class labor wages).