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 ...
I don’t know. As you can see here, more than half of the recipients come from India:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/HIB_by_nation_2006_to_2008.svg
and the top Indian companies import them by the thousands, whereas the top universities only give them out by the hundreds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_demographics
I have worked with a ton of H1b’s on my 25 years is semi design.
They are not brilliant, they are cheap and vindictive when proven wrong.
The “father” of H1b was a Sr Marketing Eng working for Intel on the original Pentium.
Even to this day, he calls himself “Father of the Pentium” even though he never worked on the design side.
To protect his job and stock options, he covered up the floating point flaw and lied to the CEO.
After he left several other companies, he landed back in India and started an outsourcing company.
Last I heard he is hiding from India gov on corruption charges.
because Americans just don’t want work hard enough to make through, much less excel, the STEM career programs
Ridiculous. This says more about where you’re coming from than it does the point you’re trying to make.
Oh, really?
Where I am coming from is about 20 years in STEM related higher education with a career focus on recruiting American High School grads for STEM careers and making sure they are better prepared for academic success at the University level and helping them with remedial course work so they can move forward with a STEM course of study successfully.
The rest of my career has been devoted to running cutting edge tech companies.
Where are you coming from?
Fact is many American High Schools have excellent advanced placement college prep course offerings that very few students take advantage of because they require hard work that high school students don’t want to put the effort into.
This attitude continues into their college studies. Most come in poorly prepared for success in STEM area studies and must take remedial courses to come up to speed.
Many find the work difficult and are unwilling to in the necessary efforts and move on to easier courses of study.
Foreign students on the other hand, almost uniformly have excellent preparation and come from societies were education is a privilege, not a right and is the only sure way to advance to a better life. They work hard like their lives depend upon it - because their lives actually do depend upon their striving for success.
While I don’t know much about engineering and mathematics employment, I can say that people with BS degrees in botany, zoology, geology, climatology, chemistry, etc, have a hard time getting employment. There just aren’t enough government-funded research projects or private business lab jobs to employ the number that are graduated every year. Even people with MS degrees find it difficult to get jobs better than bottle washers.
Your comment "because Americans just don’t want work hard enough to make through, much less excel, the STEM career programs" is utterly ridiculous on its face.
Prove it.
Absolutely true. Many foreigners come with a very different third world background and can often be arrogant, corrupt, unethical, vindictive when proven wrong, exhibit difficulty admitting mistakes or failure and host of other interesting personality traits.
H1B indentured servitude jobs are like a high tech version of marine boot camp for beating these traits out of people and socializing them into US culture.
Prove it.
Prove it?
I’ve lived it, sir for quite a few decades.
Including being one of those ill prepared and comparatively lazy undergrads who were dismissive of and who were laughing at the hard working Asian and Indian students who always seemed to be studying hard 24/7 in the Science library.
Those same Asian and Indians now run a huge fraction of the American tech economy.
Hard work, talent , training and ambition pay off and those traits simply don’t seem to be in as large of supply as they used to be in America. That includes the American children of those hard wring, highly motivated foreign H1B pioneers
And aside from some cosmetic differences and occasional social behaviors there's very little to distinguish the guest worker from the native. Similarly driven, similar IQs. The only real difference is one was my fellow citizen, the other was not.
The argument that Americans are somehow inferior in motivation, intelligence or work ethic when compared to the foreign born is not only self serving and counter intuitive, its its generally destructive.
My experience is that given similar background, skills and motivation Americans are much better than foreigners.
American values and culture provide Americans with an absolute advantage over most foreigners.
The problem is that highly talented young Americans are not choosing STEM careers and a large percentage are so poorly prepared by our public school system that those otherwise qualified Students who do try STEM ( i really hate that term, BTW) studies often drop out in frustration due lack of adequate background coming out of high school
May they choke on their pensions.
The large international bank I work for is directly replacing American IT workers with H1B’s, and has been doing it for three years.
For every American worker they’re displacing, three Indian H1B’s are brought in the door. Those Indian workers are working two and three people to a cube and are working pretty much seven days a week.
They’re afraid to complain because the bank holds their H1B, and they don’t want to get sent back.
It’s taking three of them to fill one American workers IT slot because the Indian workers are all specialized, whereas my American counterparts all have/had multiple specialties.
Anyone who says there’s a skills shortage in IT is full of shit.
This is all about displacing American workers to drive wages down. I work in the Chicago IT market where unemployment in IT is still over 6.5 percent. I know more people who are far smarter than I who haven’t been able to find full time work in IT for more than two years. These are people with Masters degrees and 20+ years of experience. They’re not low skilled or outdated skills either.
Some may complain they can’t find skilled workers in places like Kentucky for example, but the reality is in most urban cities that I’m familiar with, American IT workers are not in short supply, quite the contrary. Wage stagflation in this industry is horrible too. I’ve been very fortunate that I haven’t lost my job in this recession (yes, we’ve been in one since July of 2008) however I’m stiill making what I made almost ten years ago. So is most everyone else I know in this market. One sign of a labor shortage in any industry is rising wages. That’s Economics 101, and it isn’t happening here.
STEM labor shortage my ass!!!!!
BTTT!
“The reason America has a tech shortage is that American college students have historically been too lazy to study for.”
Dead-on. Our video game society makes it NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE for most kids (especially boys) to sit down with a book and actually THINK. Sure, some fall through the cracks and actually get a good education and do well, but most land just where the feminists always wanted them - drifting around in their 20s, going to some night classes, trying out one career after the next. Basically useless.
Of the people that I work with, some of their kids did well (kids of immigrants), but EXACTLY ZERO of the kids of native-born Americans did well (other than mine, of course). Your comment seems to blame the kids...but it’s much deeper than that, it is the parent that proudly displays the picture of his kid in a football uniform, rather than graduation gown - it is the parent, that grew up in the US, that thinks public schools, or society, for that matter, hasn’t changed in 40 years. Immigrants, to their credit, know American culture MUCH BETTER, and do not want their kids to have anything to do with it, at least until they’ve finished their education.
(and by immigrants, I’m speaking generally about non-Hispanics, although there plenty of Hispanics that I work with, also with successful kids)
Just because you have a STEM degree doesn’t mean you’re a fit for an opening. We’re finding it hard to find suitably experienced & competent “mobile app” developers. There are LOTS of openings for “big iron” programmers, but most graduates don’t even know such platforms _exist_ much less have any knowledge whatsoever suitable for hiring. Specializations are necessary, and specialization by its definition means few will have sufficient competence (Heinlein’s “specialization is for insects” quote highlighting the fact few are, in fact, broadly competent).
Got one who knows iOS, Android, and/or Win8/JavaScript, along with JSON, XML, plus suitable UI and mobile data skills? who can handle fast-paced requirements & deadlines, big-client (a la Fortune 50) demands, graceful under pressure, and needs no hand-holding? willing to work near Atlanta? We're having a tough time finding them.
Just because someone is smart and "works in IT" doesn't mean they're ready to drop in to any technical opening.
I know plenty of folks like you described -- some of them aren't working. Why? H1B's.
You cannot deny that H1B's are displacing American workers. It's happening. I see it every day.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
