Posted on 05/20/2014 6:40:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The idea that we need to allow in more workers with science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) background is an article of faith among American business and political elite.
But in a new report, my Center for Immigration Studies colleague Karen Zeigler and I analyze the latest government data and find what other researchers have found: The country has well more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data indicate that such workers are not in short supply.
Reports by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the RAND Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the National Research Council have all found no evidence that STEM workers are in short supply. After looking at evidence from the EPI study, PBS entitled its story on the report “The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage: How Guest Workers Lower U.S. Wages.” This is PBS, mind you, which is as likely to report skeptically on immigration as it is to report skeptically on taxpayer subsidies for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
They probably have little to no skills.
My son, who is now in engineering school at Virginia Tech, was going to enter the STEM program that was just starting up at the time he was to enter high school. The teachers had a two week summer program to start the young children off and give them a flavor of what was to come so I dropped him off at the local high school and picked him up mid afternoon.
He was very upset as he said they spent most of the day surfing the Internet on the subject of rockets and then they made a couple of rolled up paper rockets.
An entire summer day wasted on nothing so I found out the list of teachers who would be doing the teaching for STEM and found none of them had the qualifications to teach any hard science or mathematics. On top of that many of the children enrolled had lousy GPAs and were not the children we thought would be attending a program developed for the express purpose of advancing children into science and engineering careers.
That first day was his last for the STEM program and he took all the real hard classes by himself.
The STEM program is nothing more than another waste of our hard earned money and a feel good for both low-level students and low-level teachers.
The companies sponsor them in the US and they work for a number of years at 50-75% of the wages of a comparable US citizen.
Once the visa holder has a green card and is on track for citizenship, they either get a big raise or move on to a better paying job.
This ploy was pioneered by the Silicon Valley tech companies to recruit foreign Stanford, Berkley and other grads s cut rates and it has fueled the tech industry ever since.
These H1B visa holders are some of the most talented and productive members of our country and a huge fraction of the Silicone Valley elite stated their careers as H!B indentured slaves, doing the technical work American college students were too lazy to study for.
The reason America has a tech shortage is that American college students have historically been too lazy to study for.
Science and Engineering students often spend their Friday and Saturday evenings hitting the books, not the bars, while Gender Studies students are out at the bars studying gender with free government supplied contraceptives .
“The country has well more than twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. Also consistent with other research, we find only modest levels of wage growth for such workers for more than a decade. Both employment and wage data indicate that such workers are not in short supply.”
How will the “Sure, I’m against illegal immigration, but am all for those who want to come here legally” FReepers going to spin this one? That it’s O.K., since Big Business will be able to import more low wage employees, thereby displacing American workers who then can get on the 99-week unemployment gravy train and everything will be hunky-dory?
Agreed. “STEM” is a mighty broad designation and many undergraduate degrees don’t count for much, while many employers are looking for experienced hires.
Actually, top flight people of ANY type are in short supply.
That’s what makes them “top flight”, every profession has a few elite practicioners.
Sometimes a few are sufficient for demand, sometimes there’s a need for more.
And there’s a solution for that: we call it the Free Market. . .
I hope you’re right. My son is starting college in August in astronautical engineering.
H1Bs are primarily used for foreign students graduating from US universities? That’s news to me!
If competent, experienced employees of ANY kind are in short supply, then it stands to reason that competent, experienced engineers and architects are in short supply.
I believe you must have meant to suggest that both previous posters are correct—not wrong.
RE: Hmm, I wonder what an “H1B Visa” is?
The US H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in specialized fields such as in architecture, engineering, technology, mathematics, science, medicine, etc..
That's the way it works.
Foreign students make up a huge fraction of our countries STEM enrollment in many Universities because American public schools do a poor job of preparing high school grads for STEM studies and because Americans just don't want work hard enough to make through, much less excel, the STEM career programs
Eliminate H1B visas and the brain drain from our universities would be very problematic for the country.
I personally watched our POS immigration system deport a brilliant PhD Aeronautical engineer with a specialty in missiles for a paperwork error at the same time the Social Services jerks were recruiting illiterate illegal aliens to have government funded delivery of their anchor babies in American hospitals.
He went to China instead where he was welcomed with open arms , which was not a good thing for the United States
I think you've nailed it.
Not exactly true.
Cheap technology people are in short supply.
Its all about “cheaper and shorter design cycles” right now.
Ridiculous. This says more about where you're coming from than it does the point you're trying to make.
I have a son-in-law who is an expert in computer website design. He’s already quit two or three well-paying jobs because he didn’t like the way the company he worked for was going. He almost immediately got hired with better pay by other companies after quitting those jobs.
Not exactly true.
Cheap technology people are in short supply.
Its all about “cheaper and shorter design cycles” right now.
It takes talented, top flight people to do things faster and cheaper and such people are hard to find.
If anyone knows where such people are in surplus supply please let me know because we are looking
As does it seem many of the people who run hotels and motels when the wife and I go out west on vacation.
I was puzzled - told him I knew of nurses who were having a hard time finding work.
Here's where it got real - he said, ‘American nurses want too much money’.... So the only ‘shortage’ was of desperate third world types willing to work for low wages.
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