In resurrecting this blog, I ran across a few posts that were composed but never published. Some are too dated to post now, but I found it amusing that this one is as relevant today as when I composed it five years ago. In re-reading this post, I thought it might be good to clarify that I'm one who believes that immigration is and has always been one of the strongest and most dynamic influences on our nation's long arc of prosperity and global influence. I just deplore the possible neglect of our own educational system because of the availability of highly skilled foreign talent.
, and being alternately excited and scared to death.
Friedman discusses what he describes as a "quiet crisis" under way in the U.S., with the supply of domestic advanced science and engineering talent from U.S. universities in sharp decline, and a continuing decline in students headed toward those disciplines from the U.S. K-12 pipeline.
Tracy Koon, Intel's director of corporate affairs explains:
What we are finding is that as you go up the food chain from bachelor's to master's to PH.D.'s, the number of people graduationg from top-tier universities in those fields are increasingly foreign-born...For years [America] could count on the fact that we still have the best higher-education system in the world. And we made up for our deficiencies in K through twelve by being able to get all these good students from abroad. But now fewer are coming and fewer are staying.
While I found the entire discussion profoundly disturbing, what troubled me most was an assumption on the part of some U.S. technology companies that the solution to the problem is to lift the immigration restrictions on foreign talent. Friedman reports that Intel has "been lobbying the INS for an increase in the number of advanced foreign engineers allowed into the United States on temporary work visas".
What about lobbying to improve U.S. K-12 education in science and mathematics? This foreign talent is going to be increasingly less interested in working in the U.S. (even without the immigration restrictions) because of the increased availablity of high-technology jobs in their native countries.
I live in a community with a declining public school enrollment, an aging population, a state government with a chronic budget shortfall, and an eternal willingness on the part of my fellow citizens to place public education near the bottom of the priority list. I recall a much different environment during my childhood, when the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin's successful orbiting of the Earth in 1961 had us scared spitless, and stirred a renewed emphasis on, and funding for science and mathematics education. The generation that came out of that environment who got us to the Moon, developed the personal computer, lasers and countless other 20th-century technologies is nearing retirement.
In contrast with the wake-up-calls we got in the 50's, Friedman observes that "When we got hit with 9/11, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice, to address some of its pressing fiscal, energy, science and education shortfalls - all the things that we had let slide. But our president did not summon us to sacrifice. He summoned us to go shopping".
Perhaps this explains why it appears that corporations in need of science and engineering talent find it more cost-effective (or perhaps just more productive) to lobby for immigration relaxations than to lobby for improved education.
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