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Comment by huy-nguyen | Hacker News Reader

Per [1], the House version contains important immigration provisions.

1) The bill would create a new category of non-immigrant visa called the W visa for owners (W-1) or essential employees (W-2) of start-up companies and their dependent family members (W-3).

2) The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits, enabling them to quickly apply for permanent residency without being subject to the availability of an immigrant visa. This would benefit Indians and Chinese nationals the most.

3) The bill would provide for Temporary Protected Status for certain qualified residents of Hong Kong, as well as Special Immigrant Status for highly-skilled Hong Kong residents, capped at 5,000 per year.

However, this bill is not finalized yet according to [2]:

> But it’s not through to Biden yet: Now the Senate and the House will have to reconcile their competing versions of the bill, and “a final measure is unlikely to be completed before the end of May”

[1] https://www.rnlawgroup.com/immigration-provisions-in-the-ame...

[2] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/03/29/the...

Edit: clarified that these are only in the House version and will have to be reconciled with the Senate version.

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> 1) The bill would create a new category of non-immigrant visa called the W visa for owners (W-1) or essential employees (W-2) of start-up companies and their dependent family members (W-3).

I'm always disappointed in this style of visa. These are the kinds of people we want to keep, not make their stay contingent on working at or running a startup. To me, it's really stupid that anything but a tourist/business visit visa should be non-immigrant; all long-term stay visas should provide an easy path to permanent residence (sure, assuming whatever reasonable qualifications are met).

And I wonder if these W-* visas will be similar to the H-* visas, where if you quit or are fired, you need to find similarly-qualifying employment in a disgustingly short amount of time, or you're forced to leave the country. So you end up having very little employment mobility, and many people end up feeling trapped in a job they hate, because finding a new employer that will sponsor your visa isn't always a slam dunk, and plenty of things can happen to screw it up.

All this is just band-aids on the current crap immigration system we have. But no one has the political courage (or capital?) to completely throw out the current system and write a new, sane, humane one from scratch.

> To me, it's really stupid that anything but a tourist/business visit visa should be non-immigrant; all long-term stay visas should provide an easy path to permanent residence (sure, assuming whatever reasonable qualifications are met).

Americans don’t want that. A lot of our immigration-related problems is that the executive branch created a de facto permanent immigration system (with modest Congressional acquiesce in the 1990s) out of what was sold to the public as a temporary worker visa.

What Americans want tends to be irrelevant vs what states want

Immigration is a federal issue.

Americans elect both state and federal representatives. All levels of government are just enacting the will of the people.

If Americans don’t want easy paths to permanent residency/citizenship, it’s up to those of us who do want that to explain to them why they’re wrong.

And this is the only reason the US is competitive in tech, around half the faang employees came through H1B/L-1 to EB. Those visas were designed to be dual intent, no-one was lied to there.

Just do what the EU does and leave immigration to the states, I’d be fine having a California-only green card before naturalizing. No one wants to move to Mississippi or any of those anti immigration states anyway ;-)

And the countries that did not create it don't have a tech industry. Look at Europe - how many tech success stories are there?

How can you be certain to say that Americans don't want that. Both parties ( considering political parties are representative of public opinion) are pro immigration during the elections. Post elections, they simply change their stance.

I wonder what is the vetting for the W-1 visa though? Can people just incorporate a business and get a visa? Or does it need minimum funding and employees? Should the individual have particular skills or experience in that field?

These provisions were included in the House version [0] but not in the Senate version [1], so I'm not sure if they have actually passed. Not much Twitter activity on the W visa either.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521...

The United States should be offering permanent residency to practically everyone with a Ph.D.

That would lead to the immediate creation of Ph.D. farms in other countries

Also more journals will be created:)

You say that like they don't already exist

Not at all. Extra benefits to Ph. D. holders means more Ph. D. mills, regardless of how many already exist.

So who cares? What's the point?

That makes a lot of sense, I just hope that doesn't mean some countries don't start making PhD mills for schools to get around visa caps which seems like an obvious possible side effect

Unfortunately this is already the reality… I really hope there’s some other layer of checks on the quality of the degree or something.

Forgot all PhDs, it is next to impossible for most students and researchers who get advanced degrees from American universities to get work visas or permanent residency. We get the best talent from all over the world, spend billions on educating them, and then force them to go home.

Is the US spending billions to educate them, or are they spending billions to be educated here?

I think most PhDs are paid for by the University, not the students. In computer science, and I'd imagine most other stem at least.

True! But in STEM fields the money to pay for PhD students (tuition, stipends, fees, insurance, etc.) almost always ultimately comes from the Federal government in one form or another. Typically, it'll be paid for out of one of their advisor's grants (which usually are from a Federal source), or sometimes from a training grant of some kind (e.g. an NIH T32 or some such, which is also from a Federal source).

Yes, and then we send them back to China, Russia and India despite their attempts to stay and contribute here.

It is very much the exception to pay for a PhD education. You are usually even paid by the university while a grad student. In some fields it might have an opportunity cost (you are paid a very low salary for years as a graduate student/researcher, instead of working in industry).

> Is the US spending billions to educate them

One PhD student costs a professor about $100K - $200K per year. A third of that is stipend and the other two thirds is... well, in CS I'm not even sure. A good bit of administrative welfare AFAICT. (Universities don't pay FICA taxes for grad students and grad student healthcare premiums are actually more of a subsidy for the risk pool of the aging faculty/admins than an actually half-reasonable benefit for the grad students.)

The US graduates 2K PhDs per year, of which >60% are foreign nationals. So we spend something roughly like (2000 * .6 people) * (150000 $/person) = $180 million per year. So a couple billion per decade.

Now... we do get folks with CS BS degrees for 1-5 years at $30K/yr, which is a fucking steal, and at least a great universities they are often from the upper quarter or so of the undergrad distribution. So maybe the students are also paying in the form of subsidized labor. But we do spend hundreds of millions per year in any case.

All of that said, as long as universities are staffing mathematics departments with shit paid ad juncts it's kind of hard to argue that our country is failing to compete due to a lack of phds...

Is looking at the per-student cost and multiplying by the number of students a good way to evaluate the systemic cost? Or are there other factors separate from the marginal cost to a professor of an additional grad student which should be included (e.g. are there institutional-level resources which are significantly supporting this workforce?)

> Or are there other factors separate from the marginal cost to a professor of an additional grad student which should be included (e.g. are there institutional-level resources which are significantly supporting this workforce?)

No. At least, not in CS. What sorts if things would you be referring to? Compute? Honestly you're better off with a trivial cloud grant than trying to use the slurm cluster with a dozen ancient gpus for hundreds of faculty to share. Office space? Your average dilapidated cube farm is LUXURY compared to the sardine situation grad students put up with. Robotics hardware? Doesn't really scale like that. And... those are the only three things needed for like 90% of CS research. In CS, precious few dollars other than the stipend go toward anything useful. As far as a faculty member is concerns, that money money disappears into a pit.

(What's going on is that the PhD stipend is fixed by the funding agency, and the university squeezes as much as possible away from the professor/student. Just armies upon armies of assistant deans doing not much of anything while the grad students toil away doing the only useful work in the place for rent and pizza.)

Ohh I just accepted your previous statement of 2k/yr overall, but of course you're only talking about CS.

> The US graduates 2K PhDs per year, of which >60% are foreign nationals.

It looks like across fields, it's ~55k PhDs/yr, so the "Billions" quote was probably right.

Yeah, sorry, I meant just CS. (Other fields get a lot more complicated pretty quickly, but most everything boils down to "stem phd students get paid an almost living wage".)

The former, mostly. PhD students are usually funded by their university, as well as by research grants come from US government agencies and research-oriented companies and organizations.

So we (as in "various elements of US society") are paying to educate people, and then are sending them back where their home countries benefit, while the US does not. It's so dumb.

There are some cool exceptions, like some programs where students educated in the US are required to go back to their home countries. The idea is to help raise the level of education in countries where the higher education system isn't well developed or funded, and I think that sort of thing is an admirable goal. But it's so bizarre that we, for example, complain about supposed Chinese academic espionage, and complain about brain drain, but simultaneously make it really hard for international students to stay in the US after they graduate.

Aren't the PHDs producing things in the US that we use though? Medicines, research ,etc?

How are they doing that if they aren't allowed to live or work in the US after they finish their degree?

They're doing the research and publishing the results during the degree. That's part of the PHD.

PhD's real work starts after they graduate.

Sure, but the argument in this thread suggests that the US is making an overall loss by funding the research carried out by foreign nationals. This is hardly the case - the value of the research is worth more than the manpower costs spent on them. Is there greater value to be had by encouraging them to stay within the country? For sure.

Look at postdocs - the US gets them at a pittance, they are more productive than PhD students and rather mentor them; and unlike graduate students, are usually overwhelmingly foreign nationals.

Both can be true.

Since graduate students do work for universities at low wages, it seems like the universities are getting a good deal.

So how do you want to account for labor costs? After they leave, the work got done and the workers got paid. Both sides benefit from this arrangement, though you can certainly argue (and many do) that the benefits should be split more fairly by paying the workers more.

Separately, the US would benefit from letting them stay and do more work. But that's generally the case for any immigration restriction. They get in the way of mutually beneficial private arrangements. US employers can't hire people who are willing to work for them, and the workers strongly benefit from being able to work in the US. Immigration restrictions are all about the government getting in people's way and the various justifications people make for continuing this interference.

The US is. NSF plus DOE Office of Science plus NIH is over 50 billion dollars, of which easily a third is going for training internationals PhDs and postdocs.

I believe this was following 911… I recall during grad school the phd student I worked with has to return to Thailand but only because the changes made as a result of 911… pretty sure it was easier pre 911… is that right or am I mis remembering?

Perhaps. But the other side of the coin is that keeping them here serves as a brain drain to their home country. If less and less are there to elevate those countries then what? We spend billions sending aid instead?

Certainly, there has to be consequences to the countries losing minds & bodies.

There’s huge costs particularly to English speaking developed countries like India and Bangladesh.

Exactly! But meanwhile the narrative in the USA is "we're so benevolent for accepting the world's best & brightest." The USA gets stronger. The sources of that strength weaker. It's a broken idea.

If you take a top experimental particle physicist and put him in Dhaka you don’t get great experimental particle physics; you get a mediocre accountant with memories of particle physics.

Let me rephrase:

If you take one of Dhaka's best and brightest and remove him/her...Dhaka gets nothing.

I think the usual counter to this argument is that rather than being the best & brightest, he's a product of his time, place, and circumstances - if he were to remain in Dhaka he likely may not have been noteworthy. We really don't know one way or another.

Noteworthy is relative. Aside from being able a person needs to have the "heart" to relocate to the USA. So yeah, she / he might professionally end up an accountant. But the heart to change things? That should not be discounted either.

Like it or not, there is a darkside to USA immigration policy, just because its been normalized doesn't mean it's not there.

I don't think anybody discounts it or hand waves brain drain away. My concern is that these notions might inform (well meaning) ideas of what immigration should look like - it feels overly paternalistic and minimizes the immigrant's desires and agency. Immigration is already an incredibly difficult and uphill task that's near impossible for the vast majority of people even with the means and desire to do so. However difficult you think it is, multiply by a factor of 10. So now should the process be even harder because of concerns about brain drain? For example, should American concerns about brain drain from the underdeveloped countries inform if people should be allowed to immigrate from there? Should immigration be open only to people from rich countries?

If you look at the guy who would be a top experimental particle physicist in the West and leave him in Dhaka you don't get great experimental particle physics; you get a mediocre accountant with dreams of particle physics.

Fazlur Kahn, the structural engineer and architect behind the Sears Tower, once went to accept some award in his home country of Bangladesh. Someone asked why he didn’t come back home. He responded: “I design skyscrapers. What would I do here?”

Which is true. At the same time, what’s been his contribution to Bangladesh? Nothing, aside from a bit of trivia I tell people when I show them around Chicago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazlur_Rahman_Khan

So what's the takeaway from the anecdote here? That Fazlur Khan should have returned to Bangladesh?

Good time to start a fake PhD mill business!

For better or worse, the relevant authorities in the US already have very well-established processes for figuring out what kinds of institutions (and even what specific graduate programs) "count" for different kinds of student visas, and so I would imagine that for this new visa category they would build on that existing foundation. Your fake-PhD business would need to deal with accreditation etc., and then compliance and overhead issues thereof- and that is A Whole Thing (ask me how I know).

If they get a Ph.D. in the US, I agree totally.

Maybe they could start with medical doctors before they start replacing Ph.D's in the STEM field. Just to be certain that it will work, you know.

Exactly. Stem is basically just the remaining non-inheritance-based middle class jobs, and it seems like someone is in a hurry to reduce the wages there. But not wages of doctors, lawyers, and CEOs.

> The United States should be offering permanent residency to practically everyone.

FTFY

Why would we want non-STEM PhDs? These are not additive to the U.S. economy or culture. We have a glut of non-STEM PhD holders as it stands.

you're being downvoted for the second sentence, but the third sentence is indisputably true.

Depends what you mean by “glut” — if you mean the welfare rolls are full of English PhDs, or the ranks of middle management are gummed up with French Literature PhDs, or the arms of government administration are overrun by political science PhDs, then sure.

If you mean most PhDs don’t get faculty jobs, well, then we have a glut of basketball, football, and baseball players too.

Don’t we have a glut of Ph.D’s here in the US already?

PhD's from where? From American universities? Or from Kwame's StickShack University in rural Congo?

Depends what you want out of immigration. Consider the profile of the people who emigrate. People with PhDs are typically elites back home. Moreover, less than 10% of people in Asia would emigrate if they could: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi.... So you’re selecting people who are antisocial enough to leave kith and kin behind for economic opportunities.

Not saying this pejoratively—my whole family fits this profile. But people don’t think enough about what sorts of folks we’re really bringing in and how that changes our culture.

> The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits, enabling them to quickly apply for permanent residency without being subject to the availability of an immigrant visa.

Finally! It was utter idiocy that it wasn't already the law to staple a green card to each PhD diploma earned by a foreigner for my entire life.

> This would benefit Indians and Chinese nationals the most.

Many Chinese are actually against removing the per country green card limits, because Indian applicants are so many times more that keeping the status quo actually give Chinese a better chance of success.

But that was before the cap removal is limited to PhD only. I'm not yet updated on the latest stance.

> 2) The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits

I wonder if low-quality offshore post-hole-digger diploma mills can create a loophole for this requirement.

The updated version of the law would restrict this only to R1/R2 US universities. No foreign university, even Cambridge/Oxford would be eligible.

See https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&Fil... Page 218, lines 3 to 9:

QUALIFYING INSTITUTIONS .—The term ‘‘qualifying institutions’’ means institutions of higher education that are classified as either very-high research intensive (R1) or high research intensive (R2) status universities by the Carnegie Classification of Academic Institutions.

This sounds reasonable in that the current system probably has similar requirements in place for the CPT/OPT route. I think the text also says "(bb) from a foreign institution if such degree is the equivalent to a degree issued by a qualified United States research institution" which is murky. The likelihood of any of this passing are slim though.

Good time to be in the fake PhD diploma mill business!

Watch as this one gets limited and watered down. Foreign PhD graduates are a cheap labor force for STEM universities.

> 2) The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits, enabling them to quickly apply for permanent residency without being subject to the availability of an immigrant visa. This would benefit Indians and Chinese nationals the most.

Are we… still giving unfair advantages to foreign nationals and companies that hire foreign nationals over Americans in 2022?

Elucidate - your unfair advantages. Honestly at this point I am sick and tired of this dog-whistling nonsense. And when called out all of you losers act all innocent about it. That shtick worked years back, but it's just plain racist in 2022 and it's well known.

Get lost.

Sorry but you can’t toxically gaslight me and most of the country into idly standing by in the current year while governmental policies continue to give foreign countries and non-Americans advantages over the American people. The age of globalism and outsourcing so corporations can sell out the American worker and consumer for a quick buck and a cheap disposable product made in a country with lax environmental laws and wasting fuel to ship it halfway across the world is coming to a close, and none of your extremely progressive zeitgeist accusatory and inflaming buzzwords can change that, no matter how many you attempt to cram into each paragraph.

The unfair advantages (and scams and frauds that go hand in hand as well) are extensively documented and well known, which is why our big tech companies are so high on foreign nationals in the first place, and why their countries of origin love it as well.

That being said this bill is an excellent step towards bringing jobs and manufacturing back to where they belong: the USA.

What fair or unfair advantages? Nobody is toxically gaslighting you. Just pointing out that your assertions are fact free xenophobia.

Americans families pay taxes to universities. Then they pay tuition to universities. Then their children go to work to pay loans. Forever. Universities pay administrators to import labor for their government grants.

Why are there so many foreign PhD students? Are Americans lazy? No; we have to work. Education is high-class leisure in America. Decades ago, Americans went back to school after paying off loans and getting experience. Not so anymore; the pipeline is too full to get back into it.

This credentialism is being used to prove that Americans are unqualified to work in their own country. We should not be so impressed with PhDs. I assure you that a decade into this policy we won’t be.

The total foreign STEM PhDs is 15,000 per year. Even if you add all of them together for the last decade, it won't even crack the top 50 largest places in the US.

Your fact-free rants aside, what people forget is how few PhDs are there, actually. Let's take materials science; even the largest schools in the discipline do not even produce 30 PhDs per year. Less than 300 materials science PhDs graduate in total in the US per year; that's it. If all materials science PhDs ever granted in the US sit together (less than 30,000), they won't even fill a football stadium.

And you can't just scale things up, equipment is multi-million dollars and it takes years to train good scientists. Nativist attitudes like yours leads to a company like ASML residing outside the US rather than inside.

You want to dig your own country/communities' graves - go for it. Just don't expect kudos for doing harakiri.

Correct; the programs can’t scale. Schools give a fixed number of PhDs every year. They can either give them to Americans or to foreign students. Hint: same with PhD employers.

To be fair, I do understand the point of international competition for those slots, but that’s not directly aligned with the interests of the American middle class that pays the tuition and grant money to those schools.

I don’t understand your ASML anecdote. The US has far more immigrant workers than any other country on earth. Is ASML avoiding us because that’s not enough? Are Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor industries failing due to their focus on citizen training and employment rather than labor imports?

> Schools give a fixed number of PhDs every year.

There were 55000 phds awarded in 2020, up from 40000 in 2000.

I don't think you are coming into this discussion with opinions based on facts because I do not believe you bothered searching for them. You already have preconceived ideas - US universities are running a gigantic coordinated conspiracy to lockout American nationals from science and hire only foreign nationals.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most STEM faculty are hyper-ambitious people who care about grant funding and their h-indexes above almost everything else. Secondly, the funding scenario makes it much easier to recruit US nationals over foreign citizens.

Most US universities desperately want to hire US nationals for their doctoral programs; it's cheaper and more grants are available (as many DoD/DoE projects require US nationals due to export control restrictions). During my grad school days earlier in the last decade, almost all US citizen Ph.D. students were on some national fellowship, such as NSF, NDSEG, SCGSR, or EGRC. As a result, their stipends were $10,000 more than mine. And due to these fellowships, they were free for their Ph.D. advisors, while I cost my advisor $65,000 per annum. Despite these scholarships, that we have to admit so many foreign nationals paint the correct picture of the ground reality - the US doctoral STEM pipeline is really narrow.

Part of this is plain numbers - India and China have 7-8 times more people than the US does. And in the college-going age, it's an even more significant gap, as the fertility rate in the US fell below the replacement level many decades back. The second factor is the cost of education in the US. However, it's screamed about more than it really is an issue. The largest STEM educators in the nation are all public schools, where in-state tuition rates are still reasonable, and a full degree costs less than $50,000. Still, college tuition is a significant problem, and we should solve it. At the very least, it will expand the pipeline quite a bit, but not, in my opinion, enough to fill the gap.

Honest question - have you talked with any US universities' graduate program officers rather than spouting off Steve Bannon's conspiracies.? You think your points look smart, but I know what it is - uninformed ramblings since I know the ground reality.

ASML and TSMC are running almost exclusively today by US trained people. The fact that the United States trained them and lost them - is a point of deep concern. And people like you will prolong this crisis through misguided xenophobia rather than contributing to a meaningful solution.

So far I don’t think I’ve expressed any opinions that could be classified as xenophobic. I assure you that your accusation of inexperience with top STEM graduate programs is misplaced. If I had to posit a “solution”, I would first ask what the problem is. It seems to be “not enough Americans with advanced STEM education”. Well, clearly there are two ways to go about solving it. One is to import labor, but that clearly reduces incentives and makes the problem worse, so you’d also need to lower the cost and increase the supply of STEM education for Americans. This could be budget-neutral if H1B was an auction and/or salary floor rather than a lottery. I admit it seems a bit ridiculous to wring hands over a few PhDs when there are armies of H1Bs accepted on salaries that qualify for housing assistance, to say nothing of unregulated immigration. So yes, let’s have them all, as many as American businesses will pay a significant premium for. And maybe let’s also have American tax dollars spent on economically-valuable education for American students exclusively.

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