This wouldn't be necessary if we actually invested in our own citizens. I'd have no problem with it if our own population didn't have a skills shortage, but it does.
But the bit where this falls down is your use of "our own" in a context where it either has no meaning or has, let's just say "accidentally discriminatory" meaning. The idea that we should invest to "prevent" this situation is kinda distasteful.
These people are americans now. No, they aren't all citizens (though many are), but their kids are and their descendants will be. This is their home as much as it is yours or mine. This country built itself on the backs of imported talent, there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
[1] No idea if that's a median data point, but it's probably close. When people talk about STEM immigrants they mean very long term residents who will realistically be here with their families for the rest of their lives. You want to imagine a job-jacking horde of foreign-educated people who don't speak English. The truth is rather different.
Why? It's not like Americans were a much bigger share of the world population in the past.
There is first the network effect, uneven distribution of financial resources, uneven availability of educational resources, the high number of societies that don't value individuality nor deviation from tradition and the norm.
(1) those who have already made it here and intend to stay, are Americans now. That's what America has always been about. Anyone who disagrees is a despicable nativist who should be deported back to Germany, England, or wherever their great grandparents came from and sign their house deed over to the descendants of whichever native americans lived there before being violently and unlawfully removed.
(2) those who have not yet made it here, we owe nothing to yet, and we certainly ought to invest in ourselves. The education system in this country is so bad it's a joke, and it's not great if we end up relying on other countries educating people and sending them here just because our own education is so awful. That is a very precarious position to be in.
It's a reasonable, defensible, globalist stance.
And it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with such a stance and make the national well-being a priority over the comparatively greater struggles and sufferings of people outside our borders. But unfortunately I think we always use smoke and mirrors and avoid facing the issue head on.
I appreciate that you have a clear and we'll articulated position for your preferences for how your tax dollars should be spent. I hope that we as a society can have open discussions and debates that welcome and encourage opposing worldviews to our own, and that we can hold a default mindset to first understand our compatriot's views, rather than first defend our own positions.
Completely agree with (1).
If so, the below two points will cure you of this silly idea and any similar ones:
(A) if our money-making machine (our economy) is not well taken care of, such as by assuring its supply of skilled labor, it may deteriorate, leaving less money left over to donate to the worthy causes you want it donated to. If you don't take care of yourself first, you will be to weak to help others.
(B) The education system in the US is not lacking for money, it simply uses the given money poorly. It can be improved without spending more money.
Education is a capital investment, not a luxury consumable good.
IMO either position is perfectly defensible. Helping those who are "your neighbors" (those who are more proximal to you) first is defensible, and so is helping those around the world catch up to the living standards of the developed West.
What is not good is that we continue to mask pragmatic or moral decision making with irrational, illogical, emotionally charged positions, on both the left and the right. That, I wish would change.
Wouldn't "our own" as used earlier also include "these people"?
I think you are injecting context which was never there in the first place.
I don't...look. All I want to say is: I hope you're aware that you're making enemies with statements like this.
Luckily most people are able to read a comment from a random person on the Internet, classify it as a different opinion from theirs and go on with their lives.
In other words, I think I can understand the views I'm criticizing.
I do not get the sense that the same is true of the comment to which I replied. It seems to carry a level of tone-deafness that would be mystified by any pushback.
No, you've missed the very simplest critique of the US immigration system: that it takes years to decades of effort and incredible, Kafkaesque arbitrary hoop-jumping to get an actual Green Card, let alone an American citizenship. The system is legible neither to its owners (Congress) nor to its users (immigrants and visitors).
We can talk about sending "temporary" immigrants home when we've stopped making "permanent" immigrants (those on immigrant-track visas) go through hell just to turn their visa into citizenship. Let's naturalize the people we already have living and working in the country, and then talk about reforming our system for granting further visas into a nice sensible points system.
That said, we should find a balance where we both attract highly skilled foreign talent and develop our own in-house talent.
In order of preference I would see them treated equally and made citizens, kept out of the labor pool, or left as they are.
As a citizen the current situation seems be the least preferable option and I see no reason things ought to stay as they are.
In fact basically destroying the H1B system as it stands is probably the best first step. The bigots that make up 40% of America would probably support it and our idiot in chief would probably sign it.
Then we could replace it with a system whereby these valuable people have a sane opportunity to come here permanently and compete on even footing with natives when the wind changes with at least lukewarm support from the business community eager for more employees.
No we didn't. We built our country on the exploitation of poor european factory workers, chinese "slave" labor and african slaves.
This country wasn't built on "talent". It was built on exploitation of CHEAP or free labor.
> there's no valid reason for that to stop now.
We stopped it many times in history to protect AMERICANS. Go read about immigration history rather than propaganda we are forcefed. European immigration was stalled to protect american labor. Chinese immigration was stopped to protect american labor. And if you think about it, even american slavery was stopped to protect american labor.
Immigration wasn't all great. Throughout US history, it led to lots of turmoil, displacement and heartache.
Nothing is all great or all evil like people with agenda like to believe. There are pros and cons to everything. The skewed "pro-immigration" policy the past 50 years has gutted american labor and american society. We need a more rational policy.
And the fact that america/american government shouldn't favor AMERICANS over immigrants is pure rubbish. It's neoliberal fantasy. As a nation we have gone too "left". We need to correct our trajectory lest america fall off the tracks entirely.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of yourself, but if you were being intellectually honest you would realize that this is not a rational well researched stance.
This topic has been researched to death already so we're not going to break any real ground but I would ask you two things specifically:
1. When you studied hard, were you supported to study hard? Were your basic necessities covered (food, shelter) so you could focus? A lot of kids don't even have this basic level of stability in their lives, and maybe you didn't either.
2. How did you get into computer science? When I was growing up I didn't know anyone who was a programmer of any kind and wouldn't have even known to consider it had I not gotten lucky and took a programming class in highschool partly because it allowed me to drive to the community college to do it and get out of school almost half of the day. If I hadn't had transportation and money for gas it would have never happened and who knows where I would be now.
I worked a fulltime job during ungrad and grad school (and did programming jobs on the side for about $75 per hour). I worked my way through.
> How did you get into computer science?
John Carmack mostly. I saw some guy play quake online and it blew me away. I saved money to buy a computer and pay for internet. Which lead into writing scripts and websites. Then into computer science.
How did you write those scripts and websites, did you have a computer growing up? Internet access (what little internet there was to be had then that is)?
I'm not trying to take away your achievements, but I think this kind of thinking is a big part of what is wrong with how we make public policy. We see things in a very narrow way (just human nature) and we generally have a hard time empathizing with other people and their experiences. I think if we could get over that and stop romanticizing the exceptions and start understanding better the average experiences of people in our societies, maybe we can make better decisions that allow more people to succeed.
By the way working full time through undergrad and grad school would have been tough, I ended up taking out loans myself (partly so I could enjoy the experience a little more and not work all the time, only most of the time) so kudos to you for pulling that off. I'm not sure I want everyone to have to go through that (if even they could have done that, not too many people can make $75/hr even as professionals let alone students), but there is nothing wrong with taking pride in having done it yourself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/sunday-review/push-dont-c...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/education/edlife/overachi...
Then I'm not so sure.
That story is how high-schoolers in Silicon Valley are committing suicide at an alarming rate. Reading between the lines some, it tells you that Silicon Valley parents (who are probably some of the most driven people in the country) are expecting their kids to be just as driven/high achieving as them. The kids cannot cope with it and take the only way out they know of.
I think this is very different from what ronnier is suggesting when he says "life is too good, too easy, for the average american." Children in SV are not average americans.
"""At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.""" https://www.city-journal.org/html/vocational-ed-reborn-15253...
I don't agree. I think we have far more average talent than we have companies willing to hire only average talent, particularly if said average talent does not already live within 20 miles of them.
I went to a top liberal arts college, and majored in physics for most of my time there. Within the physics major, every single student was either 1.) An immigrant 2.) The child of an immigrant or 3.) Jewish. It was similar - though a little less pronounced - in the CS and math majors. Most of my friends there were from comfortable middle-class American backgrounds, and most of them majored in English, music, history, or psychology. Many of them are struggling financially or still dependent upon financial support from parents, 12 years after graduation.
The American educational system is such that you can largely make your own choices from college onwards (and to a limited degree, in high school too). This is a great strength of America, but it also means that sometimes people make choices that don't work out for them. The native-born citizens I know that invested heavily in learning math & computers when they were teenagers are doing great, even if they came from dirt-poor backgrounds. The ones I know who figured there would always be a job waiting for them, even if they came from very comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, are barely scraping by.
In other words, the aversion to STEM among elite US students is rational.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...
So much this - I know of this from my own life.
I got a state funded CS education for around 500$ a year (if my family had been poorer, they'd have paid me to study) - it was a good one, because I keep going back to my annotated Sedgewick.
Graduated with zero debt, with an open source project I was working on for years which meant that I spent the first few years of my work life knowing I could take risks (not that I did take too many).
In the Bay area now and seeing clearly the impact of an expensive education on people's choices - not everyone needs to be a college graduate, however putting an expensive price tag on it means that only people who are sure they can get a financial return on their education will take up that risk.
There is a chilling effect on women, who are expecting to be discriminated in the industry, driving them to other vocations where they don't expect to incur similar challenges with financial gains or professional advancements.
In fact, purely from a state investment point of view, CA is getting my tax dollars to spend while my college barely gets anything back from me.
I really wish my kids would get a similar springboard to start their life off without an albatross around their neck, but they are probably entering a system which is probably going to maximize immediate financial returns from them instead of expecting them to be late bloomers becoming productive over time.
https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly...
https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html FYI - It may not look like much on the graph but the US is 2 years behind the top rankers.
I'd also like to see China and India and Russia on that list.
USA is big enough to be an above average nation and a below average nation combined.
Israel, that ranks significantly below the US on that chart, has perhaps the largest technology industry per capita in the world.
Which runs largely on olim hadashim (new immigrants) from Western countries and the former Soviet Union.
Either the best here will compete with the best there, or the best there will come here (or vice versa)