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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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...a
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 contemplat
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).
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.
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.....
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.
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.
How about Americans first? How about encouraging our children to stop dropping out of high school? How about supporting American-born students to pursue degrees in the math & science fields? I don't want our universities to be a revolving door for a bunch of foreign students to be undocumented and allowed to live in some suspended immigration status while they enjoy the benefits of Amercian-born taxpayers. Isn't that how the supposed 9/11 hijackers got into the country? Bad idea bro. You should be focusing on helping on something else.
It is hard to see how this is responsive to Kennedy's actual proposal. His suggestion is that foreigners who complete their Phd's should be allowed to stay. You are complaining about people who come here and don't finish their degrees. But they would not even be covered under the above proposal.
We do not do anything for the children who are dropping out of high school by discouraging foreign students from helping to build our college system.
You just fell into the same trap. "by discouraging foreign students from helping to build our college system".
1) Our college system has been "built" for centuries.
2) foreign students are just that. Foregn.
3)If foreign grads want to stay,but can't due to visa quota's, thank corperations such a Microsoft for ABUSING theH1-B visa system out of greed, not necessity.
This is an American problem to be fixed by American's for the greater good of America.So
“American universities regularly graduate American students of the highest quality, and our economy has reaped the benefits for decades.”
How little you know about american universities. We graduate MBA’s that are destroying this country and they know little about quality and realiability and leadership.
We graduate lawyers like japan graduates engineers.
The list goes on and on but you get the idea.
Look around this country is going down the tubes and we are only maintaining our standard of living on borrowed money. You politicans in washington are so out of touch I doubt if you know america exists outside of washington dc.
Signed
Former university professor.
Isn't this the drug addict that tried to drive a car into the Capitol?
Perhaps, but his comments and analysis of our current predicament globally is due much more respect from a person like you than the drug addict (we're talking ILLEGAL cocaine), dry-drunk, AWOL Vietnam "flyboy" who has inhabited the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue for seven years too long, having blundered the U.S. into a $3 trillion war with no end, 4,000 dead & 25,000 injured soliders.
. . . And counting, and counting, and counting.
Chimpy's driven our country into a ditch on this and other things too numerous to mention here. It will take at least two more presidental terms to even get us back to where we were at the end of the Clinton administration.
So,why is it important to you whether Rep. Kennedy was under the influence of prescription drugs & ran his car into a barrier near the Capitol? Note: he did NOT run his car "into the Capitol," I don't care what you heard on talk radio.
Who to you prefer, Sean "Sieg Heil" Hannity or "OxyContin-Man" (AKA Rush Limbaugh)?
honestly? you're really going to call the character of Kennedy into question at this point? Have you taken a look around at the character of the Repub Leaders?
The underlying premise of the argument seems to arise from a luminary visionary. Facilitating entertaining educated individuals benefit society. However the criterion of selection raises questions. Maybe including a study relating PhDs holders to productive output could answer some of the questions. High skills may outweigh dry frills but not shy wills. Nevertheless, the boost to financial profit of American educational institutions should be considered. Considering the opposite of our statements can sometimes help. Obviously, it seems if we were concerned about profit then instead of giving a green card to PhD holders, we should give PhDs to green card holders.
What about the BILLIONS of unskilled ILLEGAL ALIENS? What do you plan on doing with them?
Should the millions of illigal aliens in this country stop us from trying to address other issues? That seems a short sighted approach.
Oh he loves those. Nothing better than supplying people who pay no federal taxes with health care and education at the expense of American citizens. These people (not just Kennedy, pretty much all of them) who allow this to persists are traitors.
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