

Silicon Valley Engineer Testifies on Need to Retain Talented High-Tech Students and Professionals - felipe
http://www.ieeeusa.org/communications/releases/2008/061208.asp

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felipe
The reason I posted this article is because I have first-hand experience as a
foreign-born worker who immigrated via a work-visa and eventually got my
masters here in the US.

The fact is that the immigration process for high-skilled workers is very
long, cumbersome, and one must be pretty motivated to stay. I know many high-
skilled people who were not able to stay even though they wanted to.

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mynameishere
Blahdy blah blah blahdy blah blah blah lower my labor costs please kthxbye.

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timr
I'm torn. We _already_ pay for foreign citizens to get graduate degrees from
US schools (via NIH, NSF, DARPA funding, etc.), so why shouldn't we encourage
them to stay here after they're done?

But yeah, there need to be provisions in these laws to ensure that foreign
employees are paid no less than Americans.

~~~
geebee
I actually disagree with the notion that the US pays for the graduate
educations of foreign nationals. This is a misconception that is easy to
exploit in a population that thinks of graduate school as something like
undergraduate, law, business, or medical school.

Graduate students in engineering are generally _producers_ of wealth for
universities. For example, I recently left a job where I was paid over 100K a
year (in addition to benefits and stock) to write code that built mathematical
optimization models based on data stored in large RDBMSs. Now, I don't
actually think the pay was especially great considering the skill set (and I
got a hefty raise when I left), but I know foreign grad students who were
doing essentially the same thing for a research stipend that probably amounted
to less than 20K/year, no benefits, stock, nothing (other than the possibility
of a PhD after many years of servitude). If these folks had the right to leave
the university without screwing up their visas, they'd probably be making six
figures in private industry like me (I left once I got my MS).

Sure, yeah, I suppose we should try to keep these folks here when they
graduate, but the notion that the US has somehow put itself out to provide a
grad education for foreign engineering students is baloney. We take them in
precisely at the moment they become net contributors, and not a moment
earlier. Universities save huge $$$ by indenturing grad students from
overseas.

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timr
I don't know what to tell you. You're just _wrong_ if you think that the US
doesn't pay for the graduate education of foreign nationals. I can name at
least a half-dozen foreign doctoral students and post-docs, whom I know
personally, who are/were on NIH and NSF funding. It's not a "notion" -- it's a
real phenomenon.

Now, granted, maybe these people will contribute to the GDP _someday_ ,
indirectly, through their current research. But that's an argument to
encourage them to stay here, not to fund their education and force them to go
back home when it's time to get a job.

~~~
geebee
Yeah, as the two previous posts from filipe and cconstantine point out, we're
talking about _net_ contribution.

This is why I mentioned the MBA, Law, Medicine, and Undergrad degrees as
something apart from Ph.D programs in science and/or engineering. Since most
people experience college as an undergrad, or maybe as a professional student,
they think of a degree program as a situation where you _get_ an education in
exchange for money. So scholarships and stipends are a privilege, maybe even a
kind of gift.

PhD programs are completely different. Universities use grad students to
provide labor that at a fraction of the market rate - maybe 10%-20%.

By the way, it doesn't bother me that a person would be willing to apprentice
to a professor in order to get a PhD and experience. That's the student's
decision. But it irritates me enormously when I see a visa or green card used
to force the worker to accept employment at severely below market rates.

The first is choice, the second is government sponsored indentured servitude,
an egregious violation of everything I believe is good about free markets,
democracy, and at-will employment (this is no exaggeration, I really do think
when an employer controls the employee's right to reside in the US and hopes
for getting a green card, it severely undermines personal freedom in a way
that has no place in a capitalist democracy).

~~~
timr
I just spent a big chunk of my life getting a PhD, so you don't really need to
lecture me on the economics of graduate education. I'm under no illusions that
grad school is anything like professional school. Also, I _know_ that you're
making the argument that grad student research leads to gains in long-term GDP
and new industries and blah, blah, blah. Yes. I get it.

What you're _missing_ \-- the important part of my argument -- is that these
gains are _hypothetical_ and _long-term_. In the _short term_ , we're paying
_real, present-value dollars_ for foreign students to get their degrees. If we
then _throw them out_ after they graduate, we are also _throwing away_ the
bulk of their productivity. We train them, then we cast them aside.

Your comments about "indentured servitude" are a straw man, and I'm not going
to address them here. Also, I don't necessarily support the way that
universities use foreign students to conduct research at below-market rates
(it's a big part of why I no longer work in the field in which I was trained).
My argument is narrow: if we're going to pay for these folks to get trained
here, it makes no sense to kick them out of the country when they're done.

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cconstantine
I could be wrong, but I don' think the "indentured servitude" bit is a straw
man. Employers really do have the power to have someone deported via not
letting them work. Deportation isn't something companies should have control
over.

But, overall, I think everyone in this tree is arguing the same basic thing;
it's a bad idea to throw workers out of the country.

~~~
timr
It's a straw man, because true or not, it's irrelevant to my argument (and
possibly a mis-characterization of the same). I'm not suggesting that the US
should enforce immigration policy that treats people like slaves; only that we
should allow people to stay when we've paid for their education.

I do think we all agree...I'm just really puzzled why my comment has been
received with such hostility, when we're all saying variants of the same
thing!

~~~
geebee
C'mon, dude. You wrote "You're just wrong if you think that the US doesn't pay
for the graduate education of foreign nationals". Of course the thread got a
little testy.

And I stand by my claim that these research-oriented grad students contribute
more than they cost even in the short term. They teach classes, write code,
and sign away rights to patents the moment they start their programs. These
contributions pale in comparison to the long-term gains you mentioned, and the
opportunity cost of losing a researcher who would have stayed in the US is
very real, but it's pretty easy to produce enough to justify a research
stipend even without considering those long term gains

