Immigration's Other Issue
The good news these days: Lou Dobbs of CNN has stopped
attacking every corporate CEO in America over globalization
and outsourcing. The bad news: Every night now, his new
repetitive strain is all about illegal immigration. Yes,
immigration is an important issue for our country, one
where politics and policy have become so intertwined that
finding an easy solution seems nearly impossible. And if
there is something new to report on the issue, I would love
to hear about it; but the continuous harping night after
night has kept attention focused on one aspect of this
national challenge while ignoring another equally important
one.
The other news about immigration that is not being
discussed by Mr. Dobbs is that the United States is
critically dependent upon immigrants to fill jobs in high
technology and science. Companies that compete on a global
scale — from Intel to IBM, Genentech to Pfizer,
Citigroup to Exxon/Mobil — can't thrive without
them.
The little-discussed secret here is that the United
States graduates only enough engineers and technical talent
to fill less than 50 percent of its high-tech jobs —
some say only about one-third, in fact. And there is
projected to be a growth in these high-tech jobs, so the
U.S. "tech" deficit is growing faster than our trade
deficit.
How will our companies survive? Only by recruiting
foreign workers — many of whom received advanced
training in the U.S., after graduating from a university in
their native country. These highly valuable tech workers
enter the U.S. legally, though unfortunately we are making
it more and more difficult for them to come.
As students, those who wish to pursue advanced
graduate studies (particularly in technical fields)
face more difficult hurdles obtaining visas. While
the process is smoother now than a few years
back, a survey of major graduate institutions
conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools
found a 6 percent decline in new foreign
graduate enrollments in 2004, the third year
in a row with a substantial drop. (Numbers
for 2005 did show a 1 percent increase over
2004, however, so let's hope the downward
spiral has stopped.)
What happens when foreign nationals receive an M.S. or
Ph.D. degree in engineering and then want to work for
Hewlett Packard? Believe it or not, they have to go back to
their home country and reapply to come back to the U.S.
under a work permit! The message seems to be that they need
us more than we need them, when, in fact, the opposite is
becoming all the more apparent. There are many other
countries — including their native lands — that
will welcome them with good-paying jobs.
Why the shortfall of U.S. graduates to fill these
high-tech jobs? For the past two decades, the number of
enrollees in undergraduate engineering programs has dropped
steadily. While the number of U.S.-born enrollees may have
hit bottom and begun to climb, it is, as yet, only a slight
shift and not likely to make a dent in our high-tech brain
deficit for decades to come. And the pipeline doesn't look
good, with U.S. high school students scoring among the
lowest of the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development] countries on science and math tests.
My son John works for IBM in California as a software
engineer. He is part of a team developing software for an
important and rapidly growing area of information
technology that uses the new RFID chips to track the
whereabouts of packages, groceries, drugs and just about
everything else, including (potentially) individuals like
you and me. John tells me that part of his software
development group is located in India and part in the U.S.
Of the 10 software engineers in the U.S.-based IBM
contingent, John is the only one who is not a foreign-born
transplant on an H-1 visa.
In the late 1990s, computer science enrollments were
one bright spot for U.S. students. But, since the dot.com
bust, the number of American students receiving
undergraduate computer science degrees has plummeted. By
way of example, when Harvard polled its entering class
recently, it discovered only 1 percent of those students
expressed interest in studying computer science. At Johns
Hopkins, the numbers of C.S. students have gone from over
250 to less than 75!
This lack of U.S.-born technically proficient
professionals is not only an issue for our global
competitiveness. It is also a matter of national security.
Defense companies, and laboratories and organizations like
the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, need to hire
workers who can receive a high-level security clearance.
With an aging technical workforce in our defense industry,
we are likely to see many companies unable to fill
positions that are critical for our national security.
Securing our porous borders is an important goal, and
Lou Dobbs and others are free to have their say. But I
think that making sure we continue to attract the best and
brightest talent from all over the world to fill high-tech
jobs here at home is no less critically important for our
nation's well-being.
Oh, and by the way, John e-mailed me last night to
say: "Tell your students that the job market in high-tech
is hot!"
Editor's note: This column has been corrected since
original publication. Graduate student enrollment
figures at Johns Hopkins cited in the earlier
version were incorrect.
William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.
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