Silicon Valley Engineer Testifies on Need to Retain Talented High-Tech Students and Professionals
ieeeusa.org
ieeeusa.org
The fact is that the immigration process for high-skilled workers is very long, cumbersome, and one must be pretty motivated to stay. I know many high-skilled people who were not able to stay even though they wanted to.
But yeah, there need to be provisions in these laws to ensure that foreign employees are paid no less than Americans.
They may even be technically talented, but if they have a hard time communicating in the office's native language that's gonna hurt everyone's productivity and business owners should be allowed to lower compensation for that.
I understand they are willing to work more for less, but they have some significant hurtles to overcome as it is. We are a nation of immigrants based on fair competition.
Graduate students in engineering are generally producers of wealth for universities. For example, I recently left a job where I was paid over 100K a year (in addition to benefits and stock) to write code that built mathematical optimization models based on data stored in large RDBMSs. Now, I don't actually think the pay was especially great considering the skill set (and I got a hefty raise when I left), but I know foreign grad students who were doing essentially the same thing for a research stipend that probably amounted to less than 20K/year, no benefits, stock, nothing (other than the possibility of a PhD after many years of servitude). If these folks had the right to leave the university without screwing up their visas, they'd probably be making six figures in private industry like me (I left once I got my MS).
Sure, yeah, I suppose we should try to keep these folks here when they graduate, but the notion that the US has somehow put itself out to provide a grad education for foreign engineering students is baloney. We take them in precisely at the moment they become net contributors, and not a moment earlier. Universities save huge $$$ by indenturing grad students from overseas.
Now, granted, maybe these people will contribute to the GDP someday, indirectly, through their current research. But that's an argument to encourage them to stay here, not to fund their education and force them to go back home when it's time to get a job.
Unless you think the work they are doing as grad students is worth less than what they're payed (slave-wages) the balance works out that we are getting more from them than they get from us.
The gains we get from paying for research are hypothetical. Research is an investment. Nobody expects it to turn an immediate profit, or even generate a revenue of any significance -- which is great, because it usually doesn't, and most academic research isn't commercially viable anyway.
When we pay for foreign students to earn advanced degrees, only to kick them out of the country once they've graduated, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Why are people having such a difficult time understanding this?
You are more correct than I am :)
Right, I agree with you, and I understand your argument (though I don't agree with it per se) that the return is questionable. I was just asking about your claim of "a huge number of foreign grad students and post-docs are being paid off", especially grads in high-tech industry (which is the focus of the article)
Those grants are research-based, so NIH and NSF are paying them in exchange of research work. In your argument, you sound like they are giving money to foreigners who get the money, say good bye and run away with a degree.
This is why I mentioned the MBA, Law, Medicine, and Undergrad degrees as something apart from Ph.D programs in science and/or engineering. Since most people experience college as an undergrad, or maybe as a professional student, they think of a degree program as a situation where you get an education in exchange for money. So scholarships and stipends are a privilege, maybe even a kind of gift.
PhD programs are completely different. Universities use grad students to provide labor that at a fraction of the market rate - maybe 10%-20%.
By the way, it doesn't bother me that a person would be willing to apprentice to a professor in order to get a PhD and experience. That's the student's decision. But it irritates me enormously when I see a visa or green card used to force the worker to accept employment at severely below market rates.
The first is choice, the second is government sponsored indentured servitude, an egregious violation of everything I believe is good about free markets, democracy, and at-will employment (this is no exaggeration, I really do think when an employer controls the employee's right to reside in the US and hopes for getting a green card, it severely undermines personal freedom in a way that has no place in a capitalist democracy).
What you're missing -- the important part of my argument -- is that these gains are hypothetical and long-term. In the short term, we're paying real, present-value dollars for foreign students to get their degrees. If we then throw them out after they graduate, we are also throwing away the bulk of their productivity. We train them, then we cast them aside.
Your comments about "indentured servitude" are a straw man, and I'm not going to address them here. Also, I don't necessarily support the way that universities use foreign students to conduct research at below-market rates (it's a big part of why I no longer work in the field in which I was trained). My argument is narrow: if we're going to pay for these folks to get trained here, it makes no sense to kick them out of the country when they're done.
But, overall, I think everyone in this tree is arguing the same basic thing; it's a bad idea to throw workers out of the country.
I do think we all agree...I'm just really puzzled why my comment has been received with such hostility, when we're all saying variants of the same thing!
And I stand by my claim that these research-oriented grad students contribute more than they cost even in the short term. They teach classes, write code, and sign away rights to patents the moment they start their programs. These contributions pale in comparison to the long-term gains you mentioned, and the opportunity cost of losing a researcher who would have stayed in the US is very real, but it's pretty easy to produce enough to justify a research stipend even without considering those long term gains
I think this is a tiny minority, and in fact foreigners don't even have access to subsidized loans (I know that because I fully paid for my education by myself and with personal loans -- I definitely looked for other kind of loans and grants)
I have a grad degree. Certainly I didn't get any help at all, and I don't know any one in my class who got any kind of NSF grants. I studied with someone who got a grant from his govt employer, but he is American.
For example, in my lab every grad students stipend and tuition fee came out of my advisor's grants. Then again in the sciences, if you want to do any meaningful research you have to do a PhD. I was one of the few who was lucky to avoid doing a postdoc (which in most cases is mandatory to try and get a faculty or industry research position). Note that I'd do that PhD 100 times out of 100. Was a ton of fun.
I do think that this is about retaining talented workers and bolstering our knowledge-centric economy. These people are motivated enough to come to the US and succeed, we should try to keep them.
Besides, one of the bases of capitalism is that in any trade both parties should gain. If a company wants to hire someone at salary $X that means the company expects to get $X+K value out of that person. Assuming the company bets right that means we are adding value to the American economy.
Unlike importing products from China, importing people comes with various externalities. Here's a recent example of what you can get:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7461099.stm
or, by contrast:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2001/01/05/kuala.2.t.php
...unending political nightmares.
We are in a world-economy, this is part of the deal. I understand that I'm arguing for working 1) with people I can't understand, and 2) for less money. It's just how the game works.
edit: I despise doing The Wrong Thing (tm) because it looks good politically. Maybe that makes me a bad politician, but I work in software development, not politics. Let the politicians worry about politics.
Maybe you are talking about offshored jobs, that's a whole different story. If anything, we (immigrant workers) are helping to keep jobs in the US!