Give Us Your Nerds (on immigration benefits)

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 16, 2004 | Editorial

[NewRomeTacitus]

You have been informed time and again that the country has been literally inundated by illegal immigrants while you've been out of it. Your opinion about our alien problem is worth the same as a seamstress concerning neurological surgery. I wouldn't presume to know anything about Panama.

[expat_panama]

the country has been literally inundated by illegal immigrants

Oooooohkay___  -- right --  completely overwhelmed.

Anyway if anybody wants to talk about the article please ping me.

[jimt]

More than half of the engineers with Ph.D.s working in the U.S., and 45% of the nation's computer science doctorates, are foreign-born.

Less than half of the engineers with Ph.D.s working in the U.S. have any practical value.

I am vividly reminded of a PhD engineer whose specialty was stepper motors who was unable to provide any help for a design project. A lowly BS and an undegreed (gasp!) technician solved the problem - and gained a patent.

Or the PhD engineer who wrote a specification that have required $10,000 worth of testing on every order of parts made for his company - regardless of whether the part orders were for a total of $100.

Or the PhD engineer who promoted "activity based costing" using overhead numbers that were so fictitious that any company with similar staffing could only be found in the government sector, if at all. Any commercial company so staffed would be eaten by their competitors in a week.

Or the PhD engineer who took two days to set up an FEA model predicting failure at 500 pounds load, when a five minute back-of-the-enveleope calculation showed 3000 pounds - and the back-of-the-envelope was right.

They are not the PhDs of yesteryear, like my welding prof who used an oxy-acetylene torch to bend a 10" I beam as a class demonstration, or the design prof who could actually operate machine tools, or the electrical systems prof who corrected my 4th order active filter project after about 3 minutes analysis.

The "foreign born" guys now are usually the worst of the lot.

[brianl703]

Next time you drop in for a visit, swing by the Irongate or the Georgetown South neighborhoods in Manassas, Virginia and let me know what you think, ok?

[brianl703]

Reminds me of that old joke about knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.

[rmlew]

Having alargenumber of foreign engineers and scientists is not a good thing. While some surely come here to make better lives for themselves in America and improve America, others come to learn from the US and bring these ideas back to their home countries or bring similar facilities online at home for outsopurcing. A small percentage participate in industrial and military espionage.
The H-1B visa creates a class of workers who are virtual slaves as does the immigration sponsoship of oversees foreign workers. This artificially drives down wages for American engineers, reducing the number of American knowledge workers. The WSJ understands this simple fact of economics, but being a shill for trans-national corporations pretends that the market does not work here.

We need more engineers in the US. We do not have as many as we should for a number of reasons of supply reasons.
1. A culture that does not respect intellectual achievement, especially theyouth culture.
2. A failing education system.

[brianl703]

I've got roughly another 45 years on this earth. Soon enough I'll know, firsthand, whether all of these policies which the wonks tell us are so good for the economy and the country, really are.

The wonks won't know or care-they'll be dead by then.

Which reminds me--did you ever see any opinion piece lamenting the fact that our society doesn't value long-term planning?

I thought not.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: the "anti-immigration" crowd and Einstein

That's where they lose me. Am I anti-immigrant because I take umbrage at the bashing of Americans?

I do not subscribe to the WSJ so the excerpt is all I saw. I have picked H1B, L1 to comment on.

While the whiz kids and their parents hail from nations as far-flung as India, Romania, China, Vietnam, Israel, Turkey and Russia, many are here on a very limited number of H-1b visas that are reserved for immigrants with technical skills. These visas are given out to fewer than 100,000 foreigners each year, which is less than .04% of the 293 million individuals who live in the U.S.

That is where they lose me. Stupid liberal tricks with numbers. H1Bs are good for six years, L-1s currently have no limits, why not compare to the workforce affected -- not the total population? But the most important question is, where's the proof that foreign workers are better than Americans?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,118473,00.html

The Fox News report (among others) has different numbers. To wit, In 2000, with the economy entering a full recession, America imported 650,263 foreign workers under two employer-friendly visa programs, H-1B (search) and L-1 (search). In 2001, with the economy still struggling and the tech industry laying off 500,000 American workers, Congress responded to heavy lobbying by business interests by signing off on another 712, 671 employment-related visas for the year -- a surge of nearly 10 percent in labor imports.

Furthermore, the Fox news source cites a reference. "Even a 2002 report by the undersecretary for technology at the Department of Commerce, which found that several years of data did not support the IT industry lobbyists’ claims of a critical worker shortage, could not stop Congress from issuing another 684,189 H-1B and L-1 visas that year."

And what of IT industry lobbyists? Well, "As top-dollar lobbyists made the rounds on Capitol Hill with the story that technology corporations couldn't find American computer programmers (and those corporations dumped money into Washington -- $201 million in 2000 alone), American IT workers across the country were being laid off."

Agreed that both sides use numbers games. But there is one question the American-worker bashers cannot answer (hey! if I'm anti-immigrant, you're anti-American worker): where's the proof that foreign workers are better than Americans?

[expat_panama]

We're together on almost all of your post #28-- 

INS regs are goofy - I'd bet everyone including especially the immigrants would agree

You're not anti-immigrant if you're pro-American-- All Americans are either immigrants or their descendants, though that would also apply to humans in general starting with Adam and Eve (they immigrated to the east Gen. III 24).

Foreign workers are not better than US workers - And they know it-- which is why they prefer to have American bosses.

This thread concerns legal immigration - pro and con - Bless you for not getting off topic like so many of the other posters.

Everyone's happy about immigrants in former eras, it's the present day ones we're now concerned with and the question is are there too many of these new immigrants in the US now?  Frankly, unemployment is way down-- if anything the economy is hurting from a labor shortage.   Two reasons it's a shortage-- one is that unemployment in 5 percent range is where companies put workers on overtime, and efficiency drops.  Another reason is the fact that wages are rising-- the rising cost what happens with a shortage.

Ok, everyone is going to say "the BLS is full of hoooey because I know that I'm not being paid what I'm really worth and there's no labor shortage because whenever I look for higher pay the other employers have so many other workers that can do my job cheaper than I can."   Fine, the FReepers on this thread are the exception-- I was just talking about the rest of American economy as a whole that the BLS numbers were describing.

[brianl703]

"companies put workers on overtime"

Get rid of the time-and-a-half overtime pay then. I'm salaried, I don't get it, I don't miss it.

[expat_panama]

Of course there's a big difference between overtime work and overtime pay.  I had  more overtime working in the private sector than when I had a government job, but more overtime pay with the gov't.  Overtime may be necessary in a crunch, but it's bad medicine.  Most estimating books warn that efficiency drops by 20% when workers put in 50-60 hours/week-- and even with pay bonuses the workers face a net loss after paying for divorces.

 

[FITZ]

The trick is to sort out those who will make the positive contributions to the American society and economy from others.

It shouldn't be that much of a trick. For one --- start with cutting off all food stamps, Medicaid, free healthcare, WIC, housing assistance, etc to all immigrants. Those who can't make it here on their own abilities should return home. I'm not sure every immigrant has to be a super-nerd to be a contributer to our country but we definitely don't need those who will work for $4 an hour but can survive on that because of all our vast generous social programs.

[Koblenz]

It's no doubt that many immigrants have contributed positively to America over the past few years. As Europe becomes more socialist, I am sure that more Europeans -- those few who aren't going to live off of the socialist stuff -- will want to emigrate to the United States. In 1999, something like 50,000 French citizens were registered with the French consulate in San Francisco. They were here because the US had better opportunity than France, for the most part.

Every country is going to have some people who don't want all the fruits of their labor taken by confiscatory taxes. America is sort of a beacon of hope for them. Many of them come here, and make our economy stronger, even if they supposedly take an American job, because they are providing an American company labor in exchange for their salary.

The H1B program was fundamentally flawed, because it made it difficult to change jobs, so the free movement of labor was restricted. And many of the illegals coming up from the south are here to get medical and other benefits, or put a major strain on the system because they are employed in menial jobs (albeit ones that would be difficult to fill otherwise), but they don't pay any taxes and often are a tremendous drain on local communities for health care and education. If you get a single Mexican guy that comes up here when he's 19 to pick apples, it's