Bring on the Best and the Brightest
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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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.
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.
"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.
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 ...
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.
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