It's a bit late but I want to add some facts here. Mr. Kennedy is twisting facts. Google, Intel, Yahoo!, and eBay have founders that are from foreign countries but they all came here as children. Sun has one founder out of four that was a foreign student thirty years ago. None of these people had H1b visas. In the case of Intel both of the founders were from California and the third employee Andy Grove (not exactly a founder) came to this country as a child. One interesting thing about Grove is he has a hearing loss as does one of his bosses, Gordon Moore (Moore's Law). In the early days many computer programmers had hearing loss and they probably made greater contributions then all the foreigners put together. Another example is Thomas Edison, who happens to be the most famous American in China. Now, as a result of these H1bs and massive numbers of foreign students (not to mention feminist programs) American men with hearing loss have been shut out of the tech industry and the school system. Discrimination laws written by Ted Kennedy are completely ignored. Complaints made about this are treated with hostility and derision. Ironically if you're a foreign person (like Grove) it's a bit easier to get away with having a hearing loss because Americans give foreign people more leaway in understanding English. Another fact is many veterans have hearing loss, so wait til they come home and join the militia.
Bring on the Best and the Brightest
Buzz this article up.
Over the course of our country's history, foreign-born innovators have made enormous contributions to our national prosperity. That much is indisputable. Companies like Google, Intel, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and eBay have been founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs. As the global competition for talent grows more intense, we should take care to ensure that our immigration policies allow these kinds of contributions to continue. We need these people innovating, researching, opening businesses, and creating jobs here in the United States, rather than in China or India.
For that reason, Representative Michael McCaul and I recently introduced the New American Innovators Act. Our legislation is very simple: it would exempt anyone receiving a Ph.D. from an American university from numerical immigration limits. Under our bill, these talented individuals would no longer have to wait for years on end before qualifying for a green card.
We understand that the New American Innovators Act is not a comprehensive solution to the problems plaguing our high-skill immigration system. However, we do feel that our bill, and others like it, can help to illuminate the most compelling reasons for opening our borders to the most talented, highly educated individuals in the world, regardless of their country of origin.
Too often, discussions regarding our high-skill immigration policy get bogged down in a debate over the relative quality of the American workforce. I am not diminishing the importance of that debate; in fact, it is critical to our national future. But its outcome should not be the sole determinant of our high-skill immigration policy.
Well-known Stanford economist Paul Romer has discussed a "prospector theory" of high-skill immigration. As Mr. Romer describes it, "the more people you have prospecting, the more you will be stumbling on rich veins of gold."
American universities regularly graduate American students of the highest quality, and our economy has reaped the benefits for decades. But American universities also produce foreign graduates of equally high quality. Our economy has benefited from their talents as well. In fact, between 1995 and 2005 one quarter of all start-up engineering and technology firms in the United States had at least one foreign-born founder. By 2005, these companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
The individuals we are targeting with our legislation are the best of the best. A Ph.D. from an American university is the gold standard in higher education. These individuals are not going to take jobs from Americans, they are going to create jobs for Americans, as foreign-born innovators have done for years. How much poorer would we be as a country if people like Andy Grove, who received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and whose vision and talent made Intel the company that it is today, had been forced to leave the country upon completing their studies?
There is yet another reason we should be doing everything we can to keep these students in the United States: the American people subsidized their educations. Many of the foreign-born graduates of our schools studied at universities which receive significant public funding.
The fact is that we've invested a lot of resources over the years into building a higher education system that is the envy of the entire world, and because it is the envy of the entire world it attracts the best and the brightest students from around the world. That being the case, we should want to make it as easy as possible for those students who come out the other side of our higher education system with the most skills to stay. We should want them to become Americans.
In fact, it is a great testament to the singular level of opportunity available in the United States that so many of these foreign-born innovators have navigated our byzantine immigration system so that they can stay. But we cannot expect them to continue doing so indefinitely.
Unfortunately, our current immigration system practically begs them to go to our global economic competitors. It's like Microsoft spending years training a young employee, bringing them along at great effort and expense and then, just when that employee is ready to start paying dividends to the company, forcing them out the door to work for their competitor. That approach wouldn't make sense in the business world, and it doesn't work as national policy either.
We currently have the most talented workforce in the world, but we need to make sure that our education and immigration systems are working in concert to maintain and expand on that advantage. Passing the New American Innovators Act would mean more jobs, higher economic growth, and a better standard of living for all Americans.
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I disagree with the argument that you will benefit more from entertaining them in your country than doing nothing. The brightest are compelled to share their findings because they know the consequences of not doing it. Morally upright individuals will be hindered if they lived in the US. They will feel compelled to get involved in current affairs and fix conditions. Their focus will be shifted from things they can excel at to contributing to lessen the mischief. Bright sight knows what might indict what they write.
Another law-maker sells out the American wage-earner (would have hoped for more from a Kennedy).
Of course foreigners have been a major asset to our country. But who would argue (other than CEOs looking for cheap labor) for unrestricted immigration?
Wages in high tech fields have been falling the last ten years (even for PhDs), yet the law-makers continue to flood the market with cheap workers.
Moderate immigration yes. A level of immigration which drives down salaries, NO!
"These individuals are not going to take jobs from Americans, they are going to create jobs for Americans, "
Funny, I am American and I have a PhD in microbiology from an American university and I had a hell of a time finding a job. The federal budget (NIH, NSF etc) basically determines the number of jobs available and guess what? When there are a zillion PhDs looking for them its hard as hell to get one. And then what's my reward? I make ~$38,000 per year.
What do you think I tell people when they ask about a career in science? "Well, I hope you like going to college for 9 years, coming out with $40k in debt and making an embarrassingly low salary." And somehow that doesn't make anyone want to consider such a career.
So yeah get all the PhDs you can in this country then ask yourself why you have to even do that. Ask yourself why with 300,000,000 residents the US can't fill its graduate school openings. Then bring in more and more immigrants for the jobs and continue to depress wages and keep asking why. Maybe by the time you figure it out I'll be able to retire with the aid of my lofty $32 per month 401(K) contribution.
Not all of these foreign PhDs will be innovators. In fact, the majority of them will probably work for someone else and get paid wages much lower than comparably educated and experienced American-born workers. Is there language in the American Innovators Act to guarantee that companies pay these workers a market wage?
How much did Microsoft, Google, and eBay donate to your re-election campaign, Congressman Kennedy?
"A majority of them .... will get paid wages much lower than comparably educated and experienced American-born workers"
Do you have any data to support this assertion? Saying that such programs depress wages as a whole is debatable but to allege that a MAJORITY of beneficiaries of such programs INDIVIDUALLY get paid lower wages is baseless, in my experience at least.
I have been involved in many hiring decisions in my company and in previous companies and let me tell you how it works. We look at all the resumes we have and many of them have PhDs. We invite the candidates who have the most impressive (and best suited) resumes and grill them for an entire day. Rightly or wrongly, we don't care if they are American-born or not. If we like a particular candidate the most and our HR department believes they can get them to be authorized for employment, we make an offer. At no point, not once, has it even crossed our minds to take advantage of a foreign-born candidate and make them a lower offer.
Rep. Kennedy is acknowledging the reality that exists at many of America's premier universities.
If you look at the typical physics or electrical engineering PhD program you will find that most of the candidates are not US citizens.
As it is most of them who want to stay in the states, simply get a job with a high tech company who is willing to sponsor their green card application. So, I am not sure why Rep Kennedy is making a big deal of this "problem," since it doesn't really exist.
The scandal that Rep Kennedy would be better off addressing is, "Why can't American primary and secondary students compete with foreign born students in the fields of math and science? Why is it that the science and math programs at American Universities cannot find qualified students from the states?"
I worked a couple of summers checking travellers out of the airport in rental cars and saw family after family from India and other countries on their way to Microsoft.Bill Gates of Microsoft has been regularly appearing before congress to get the worker visa program expanded so he can hire more foreign workers.
So while university IT programs go begging,including the University of Washington,football coaches are making over a million bucks per year.Will future historians cite the decline and fall of the United States being based on the citizens watching football while their economy collapsed?
totally out of touch with the reality of middle and poor America. What group of foreign lobbyists gave you money to run this through. How about dealing with the mortgage mess, no armor for humvees, no body armor, no healthcare for kids, companies outsourcing to everywhere with qualified Americans ready to work here. Stop worrying about the minute things and deal with the things we need help with.
All that need be done to encourage Americans to fill all these "jobs" for PHDs is to let the job market work. If the flow of H1Bs is stopped, salaries will increase, and that, my congressional friend, will solve all of America's technical worker shortages.
But instead, you propose to add some speculative nonsense on top of the calamity. This is not only not brilliant, it is insulting to Americans. You cite half a dozen founders of tech companies that were foreign born, but do not seem to understand that the technology industries in question were built by Americans whose motivation was a really great paycheck.
Right now, America is suffering the same technology struggle that was the signature of the Soviet Union. If other jobs pay just as much and are easier to qualify for, why do the hard stuff? This is a problem created by socialism for corporations, which, apparently the Kennedys have come to favor.
As a founder at Symantec and Visicorp and a staff engineer at Apple, I have seen the field born, grow and die, in my lifetime. I know whereof I speak.
"If the flow of H1Bs is stopped, salaries will increase, and that, my congressional friend, will solve all of America's technical worker shortages"
It's not that simple. In the short term laptops, ipods, cellphones, cameras, LCD TVs, blackberries, auto equipment, scanners, copiers, fax machines, cash registers will all become much more expensive. That's a ding the US can ill afford at this point in the business cycle. In the long term, the US would risk turning away enough talent to create a critical mass in India and China that can sustain tech innovation of its own. For the last twenty something years the US has been successfully luring away the smart people of the world, many of whom end up doing PhDs here. In fact, that trend has already begun to slow down, thanks to the improvement in living standards of those countries. Doing something like getting rid of the H1B program (for all its loopholes that are, yes, too often exploited) now would be disastrous for the US's long term competitiveness.
Kennedy's legislation is the least the US can do maintain America's leadership at a time when being competitive is getting harder by the day.
A sign of mental masturbation:
"A Ph.D. from an American university is the gold standard in higher education."
Our education system is NOT the best in the world. Not even close. High school kids in Europe will clean our clock in the workplace over the next 20 years unless we make radical changes.
American business schools have no clue. All they know how to do is lower the cost of labor.
Extrapolate these two trends and the US is Brazil in 25 years.
This is your challenge as a lawmaker, Rep. Kennedy. Do something about it.
wow I cant believe so many people would be against keeping the best and brightest here. People complain about cheep labor with one breath and High prices in the next. How do you companies are able to make all those cheep gadgets Americans love so much. $300 computers, sub $1000 flat panel TVs, $50 smart phones.
If went by some to these reactions, we may not be the world power we are today.
Many of the principal scientists involved in the Manhattan Project and the building of the atomic bomb were foreign-born immigrants, including the Italian Enrico Fermi, German-born Hans Bethe, Hungary-native Edward Teller, and The famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Should we have sent them back home?
How about Albert Einstein, I'm sure he was preventing some American from having a job too.
don't kid yourself. if the manhattan project were happening today, building the bomb would be out-sourced.
unless these phD's are in positions to really start up companies (have the funding and management skills), they are just another H1B visa applicant.
I myself paid dearly to be retrained in IT in the late 90's, being told, 'In this field there will always be employment.' only to be laid off after the dot com bust; and watch jobs shipped overseas daily now
When politicians are forced to return to the private sector (and not as lobbyists), perhaps they will get a dose of reality and realize that business practices with governmental consent have crippled this country, perhaps to a point of no return.
National healthcare would go along way toward making this country competitive in the global market.
CEO's can find any number of excuses to deny Americans jobs; while they continue to get stock options and the golden parachute when their management kills the corporation. almost every company has a mandate to offshore at least a certain percentage of IT work to meet the bottom line.
I agree with other posters who have said there are far more important issues than whether a phD can immediately remain in this country upon graduation. However, I will make an exception for the first foreign phD who can harness the hot air in DC and use it for the common weal as opposed to letting it spew empty rhetoric over and over ...
"People complain about cheep labor with one breath and High prices in the next."
Many consumer items are cheaper because of globalization, but at the same time, certain commodities, energy, food, housing, transportation have risen along with healthcare. The government has tracked the dual nature of the economy unreliably. Prices that are falling are weighted more heavily in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) than are prices that are going up, on the rationale that if prices go up, people by less that item. The net is an understatment of the cost of living.
Wages have deteriorated to match a false CPI picture. Cheap consumer electronics in no way offset increases in critical life support expenditures.
Patrick how long have you been in congress? I hope you didn't hurt yourself coming up with this incredible piece of legislature. Well done! Now I can sleep at night!
"We currently have the most talented workforce in the world..."
Ummm...no you don't.
Does anyone else get the presumably unintended irony in the choice of this piece's title?
I'd guess not.
I meant Rep. Kennedy!
Did anyone stop to think that if we slow that revolving door, those countries whose citizens we are educating and eventually keeping will feel more compelled to develop their own advanced institutes of higher education under a perceived threat or in response to "competition" for their best and brightest? We all benefit in the end. Our collective IQ as a nation goes up on many fronts...and eventually the "market" will correct itself and places like Africa and Asia will be forced to develop their education systems. The world will be a better place for all.
Sen. Kennedy is one of the smartest young leaders we have in this country.
Did he share with you some of the swag he must have gleaned from the software industry? If Kennedy IS NOT one of the "smartest young leaders," it is not for lack of money thrown at the task.
The U.S. SHOULD become self-sufficient in producing technical talent--and NOT syphon it away from other nations like India and Pakistan whose need for CREATIVE talent is obviously great. They have virtually insoluble social problems which require tech. mends of the highest order......
What Kennedy's plea REALLY hopes to establish is the thin end of the wedge of INCREASED, legal immigration from the Third World--of all types....
What the U.S. SHOULD do is to focus on its decaying, public school system--from which people of the Kennedy stratum fled decades ago--and STOP trying to use it as some sort of social agency for the improvement of minorities; instead, the public school system should be DEDICATED to preparing U.S. citizens for the technical and educational needs which universities specify....
College graduation rates are up since 1970 and wages are down adjusted for inflation (a now under counted number)
Staying the course on failed policy is not the answer. We have had 40 years of this, and results are in.
Poverty doesn't equal a prepared workforce.
Wages are down in part because of illegal immigration. Securing the borders and enforcing the laws will raise wages significantly.
Encouraging the best and the brightest in the world to get their education here and to live here is a good thing as well.
A degree is just a piece of paper, but a commitment to your country is a whole other thing. There are millions of Americans that have that piece of paper and still have no opportunity. Until every American that has the talent and the will gets an opportunity, we just don't have any to offer non-Americans. Isn't gaining access to our better educational institutions enough? Do we also have to provide jobs? I realize that these people are talented, but so are many Americans that are wasting away in our broken system. What we might be asking ourselves is how do we encourage more Americans to get PHDs and how do we encourage their continued success in productive careers. What we don't want to do is increase the competition; even if it means turning talent away.
Competition is here to stay sir, whether it's in the form of competing PhD students in the US or competing centers of academic excellence (and employment opportunity) abroad that will eventually lure away the best and the brightest of the world if they can't come to the US. The choice here is whether the US chooses to benefit from ancillary job creation (don't mean to say at all that "ancillary"is all that America is capable of) or give it up to other countries as well.
Once again the lofty-headed ones, after much contemplation,conclude non-Americans are what's best for America.
Correction: ... after much contemplation, conclude (rightly) that SOMETIMES non-Americans CAN ALSO be good for America.
It's not just information technology - it crosses a number of fields. I've done some consulting in a field where most of the senior people are not only getting ready to leave, they simply can't bring themselves to recommend it to anyone thinking of entering it. It requires a lot of skill and dedication to master the field, but the impact of continuous outsourcing has meant that what they're seeing is lower pay and longer hours. At the same time, you'll hear the industry executives moan about the shortage of qualified people and the difficulty in attracting them.
I have no objection to encouraging highly skilled people to come here and stay here. I do have objections to any plan that doesn't look at the root causes of why we're not generating our own pool.
WE have also ways had the Brain Power & Will to figure Out that which others have decided was Too complicated. We Love a Challenge. Alernative Fuel Innovations have been with US for Quite sometime- becaseu Citizens Not Incs worked on it in their Own Garages (Like Henry). But th eBig 3 'Killed the Electric Car" for their own gains ( Nice Show of Alliegence to the Flag & people who built you Up - You have used US as Camoflague and HUMAN SHIELDS!)
Give US an 'Impossible ' Task and we will Figure It Out, Give US an 'devisivve' Controversay and WE Will Settle It.
I Confido
Honestly, you privileged elite have absolutely no clue about what it is to be an Information Technology (IT) worker in today's economy. And funniest of all, you privileged elite keep talking about how IT work will magically save all of America's labor.
America's IT workers are now literally used like tissues and thrown away. They are now employed as contract workers with no benefits and no training and fired once their project is completed.
They are regularly lied to with vague promises of future projects, training, and employment to string them along as needed. As contractors, they are told to charge a maximum of 40 hours per week, yet are expected to work many hours. They are let go without warning and now must spend many months out of each year finding new jobs, relocating, etc. No retirement saving is happening here. Any worker not in management with gray hair will not be hired.
And finally, to keep their IT workers afraid and inline, management regularly outsources and insources (H1-B visas).
Here, Here!! I know the industry well. You are correct. I disagree with Rep. Kennedy, as I am sure that I always will. Let's break this down, An immigrant, albeit a very bright one, gets a grant to attend a college in the US, bypassing all Americans for the same slot because after all we need to give handouts to immigrants, gets a PHd, and then gets a fast track to citizenship. All because he is smart enough to milk our government for the costs, and then gets a job, once again ahead of an American because of quotas that we all know exist in this country, gets his paycheck and then sends most of his wages home, rather than spend it in the US. I don't like it.
Excellent retort to the Congressman who, in effect, does not possess an "America First" attitude. This country showed the world "how to do it," figuring prosperity to others is effective in preventing conflitcs.........and it worked. But now we seee our commerces re locating to foreign shores to the USA's detriment. Result? A consumer, service based economy much in freefall, resulting in a diminishing life style for our citizens.
The United States does not need to become isolationist, but merely "our country first." And Congressman Kennedy, knock off this "America's is #1" in this and that stuff. We may dominate space and grown men's toys (weapons), but we are firmly another "best among many." The world has caught and passed us in advanced technoligy while blowhards continue to bellow we're #1.
Envy of the world? Judging by our long, steady decay.........for ow much longer?
It is a great idea for are own advantages here in America but also sad in a way. What happened to are innovative ideas. We have had the brightest in this country since we signed the declaration of independence. Know we look for innovators from abroad. What we need is a policy or a mandate to enforce proper strict education for our children. We have grown lazy in this country as citizens and as parents. We need to seriously look at why are education system is failing and do something about it a.s.a.p.
I used to have great respect for the Kennedys but this just destroys whatever respect I have left. At a time when Americans are under such threat why the obsession with the needs of foreigners. I just finished a masters in computer science and I will tell you that foreigners have taken over the system. It's nothing better than a diploma mill exactly so they can get such and such visa. All of these schools have double standards that allow them to admit foreign students with poor English skills, including even MIT which recently admitted the scores they submitted to US News did not include foreign students. Being a Boston resident Mr. Kennedy should at least be aware of this. What is happening now is more and more like what happened in Ireland where the Irish people were denied access to their own education system. It was traitors like Patrick Kennedy that kept that system going. Ultimately these traitors were executed and that may be what happens in this case.
Posted April 1, 2008 | 12:12 AM (EST)