I attached (below) an Op-Ed (opinion-editorial) article printed in the NY times yesterday.
I have many mixed emotions about it, but the article is all about us PhD folk. In fact, the article itself makes me squirm, and since it does, I wanted to start a conversation and hear what you think. . . . So, what do you think about this article? Offended? Agree? Don't care?
Happy Thursday and have a great 3-day weekend,
Leigh
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Op-Ed Columns in the NY Times...
Laughing and Crying
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 23, 2007
First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.
I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America's great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer
read their names and each was handed their doctorate — in biotechnology, computing, physics and engineering — by the school's president, Shirley Ann Jackson.
The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming — "Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang" — I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were
going to be Chinese, until "Paul Shane Morrow" saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls "the quiet crisis" in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.
Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world's best minds. My complaint — why I also wanted to cry — was that there wasn't someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next
to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can't educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we'd better make sure we can
import someone else's, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.
It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as wide as possible — to attract and keep the world's first-round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent. I'm serious. I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country — in any subject — should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.
Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas available to companies that want to bring in skilled foreign workers and the number of employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because we're not training enough engineers, but they will, over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that — and where innovation happens matters. It's still where the
best jobs will be located.
Folks, we can't keep being stupid about these things. You can't have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to start companies — without it eventually impacting our standard of living — especially when we're
also slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.
My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an issue in the presidential campaign by creating a movement to demand that candidates focus on our digital deficits and divides. (See: http://www.techpresident.com.) Mr. Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in 2005 on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere, notes that "only half of America has broadband access to the Internet." We need to go from "No Child
Left Behind," he says, to "Every Child Connected."
Here's the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming book "The First Campaign," which deals with this theme. So right now, it's mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can do without Washington being focused and leading.
Which is why we've got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end in the quickest, least bad way possible — otherwise we are going to lose Iraq and America. It's coming down to that choice.
UPDATE (May 29 PM) from here:
8 comments:
Interesting that there are movements afoot to give citizenship to two ends of the immigrant spectrum;high-tech PhDs and low end non-skilled workers.
Of course, your mom brings up the point I'm *most* interested in-- that the new immigration reform would create a more or less permanent (sub)class of non-skilled/don't have to pay very much workers...
I will think more about what I think of the PhDs thing....
Do you actually get Monday off??? That's nice (back when I was a post-doc I never got those holidays...)
Dear Leigh,
Interesting article, this is the Tom Friedman that wrote the the world is flat book right? Anyways, being someone desperately waiting for a green card I can't agree more with the suggestion that PhD foreigners should all be offered citizenship :p On more academic level, economists study immigration (which isn't my specialty......), and as far as I know there is never any real evidence that immigrants do as much damage as the politicians claim and in fact they do give some local economies a boost as the immigrant workers need to consume as well.
The general idea is that immigrants may displace some workers, but the economy as a whole is doing better because of them. So you can imagine a metaphor like the pie is getting bigger, and most people are getting more pie to eat but some people end up having their pie taken away. So I always believed that what's more important is to develop a good social welfare system so that the people that got displaced will get a share of that gain the economy experienced as a result of immigration.
Also, Friedman is right that all other countries around the world base their immigration priority on these point systems where if you are either wealthy or well educated or have some skills this country needs you get green cards or citizenships faster. This only makes sense that you want to keep the brightest and richest peole around! I still can't believe that I have lived in this country for more than 10 years, paid my taxes and obeyed the law, and I still can't get a green card, let along vote!!
The above anonymous comment was written to me as an email from a terrific East Asian woman Andrew and I played squash with in college. She is currently finishing her Economy PhD at a premier University in the US.
Yeah, the kind of immigration policy that seems to actively deny green cards to people like your economist friend is just asinine. Eric and I have a friend that married her husband last summer- he's from New Zealand and then he had to leave the country for what ended up being 7 months so he could get a non-tourist visa. He's highly educated (partly in the US) and his company makes and services some kind of scientific equipment (my eyes tend to glaze over at the specifics!). Nah, we don't want those kinds of people!!!! sheesh. And they had to go through ALL KINDS of rigamarole- the bureaucracy was unbelievable- the most surreal part was that they had to submit emails as evidence that they were in love and that they hadn't gotten married so he could come here on the non-tourist visa!!!
It's really quite hard to immigrate here legally, even for people from relatively privileged backgrounds. So -- why in god's name would someone without any money or clout try to come here legally???
I have not given my opinion yet, because I'm still not sure what I think about this topic. I agree with my mom that it's interesting that we are discussing immigration both from low and high-skilled spectra.
In addition, I find the Economic perspective very interesting. Is xenophobia always lurking underneath the surface? This i fear.
We DO need to ask ourselves, why are there fewer American students going into science PhD programs than there used to be? I don't think the article directly addressed this problem, but more important than anything else, why aren't Americans interested in higher science education? This stems from problems in our educational system (k-12th grade) that needs to be addressed in the near future.
Science laboratories are the most diverse workplaces that I have experienced. My experience in science has been so full because of this cultural diversity.
I have been worried that history repeats itself. In pre-war Germany, academics, and specifically scientists, ran to Germany to study with the most famous scientists of the time. Until recently, scientists outside Germany needed to learn the German language in order to successfully compete in their field because all of the literature was written in the language. Things are eerily similar here. The US is considered one of the most rich scientific communities - so much money is provided by the US government to research and I would be suprised to find that we do not have the largest quantity of money pouring into research here. This makes the US a popular place to do research. In addition, the best (and most) journals in the sciences are published in English. Again, making the US a popular place for PhD students to gravitate. It is important to attract these researchers here and we are doing a good job of this. Many/most of my foreign PhD friends (Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, English) stay here in the US for their post-docs. How difficult will it be for them to get jobs in their home-countries? My understanding is that job opportunities in the States are still better (more options and better money) than in many other countries of the world.
So, should green cards be handed out to people as they get their PhDs?
I'm still not sure.
I have rambled and clearly am still thinking about these ideas.
i stand corrected, op-ed does not mean opinion editorial... From Wikipedia: "An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite editorial due to the tradition of newspapers placing such materials on the page opposite the editorial page, is similar in form and content to an editorial, but represents the opinion of an individual contributor, who is sometimes but not always affiliated with the publication."
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