Here’s the main — probably only — area in which I disagree with Dr. Paul: legal immigration. Not that I’m dead set against it, but I do think it needs to be more limited. The inimitable congressman has said that he supports market-derived immigration and visa levels, so after he’s elected, we’ll have to fight this one in the Congress. (All the more reason to throw those bums out!)
Vivek Wadhwa wrote in Business Week:
As far as our workforce is concerned, the new [Urban Institute] report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce. These numbers don’t include those retiring or leaving a profession but do indicate the size of the available talent pool. It seems that nearly two-thirds of bachelor’s graduates and about a third of master’s graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering.
Michael Teitelbaum, vice-president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which, among other things, works to improve science education, says this research highlights the troubling weaknesses in many conventional policy prescriptions. Proposals to increase the supply of scientists and engineers rapidly, without any objective evidence of comparably rapid growth in attractive career opportunities for such professionals, might actually be doing harm.
In previous columns, I have written about research my team at Duke University completed that shattered common myths (BusinessWeek.com, 7/10/06) about India and China graduating 12 times as many engineers as the U.S. We found that the U.S. graduated comparable numbers and was far ahead in quality. Our research also showed there were no engineer shortages (BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/06) in the U.S., and companies weren’t going offshore because of any deficiencies in U.S. workers.
So, there isn’t a lack of interest in science and engineering in the U.S., or a deficiency in the supply of engineers. However, there may sometimes be short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country. The National Science Foundation data show that of the students who graduated from 1993 to 2001, 20% of the bachelor’s holders went on to complete master’s degrees in fields other than science and engineering and an additional 45% were working in other fields. Of those who completed master’s degrees, 7% continued their education and 31% were working in fields other than science and engineering.
There isn’t a problem with the capability of U.S. children. Even if there were a deficiency in math and science education, there are so many graduates today that there would be enough who are above average and fully qualified for the relatively small number of science and engineering jobs. Science and engineering graduates just don’t see enough opportunity in these professions to continue further study or to take employment.
["The Science Education Myth," Business Week, 26 October 2007]
VDARE.com’s Rob Sanchez did the math for us –
Let’s consider just what those numbers mean. Every year, for the 15 year time period considered (1985-2000) there was a job deficit of 285,000 jobs per year. That translates to a total job creation deficit of 4,275,000. Pay attention to the time span – those years were considered to be the boom times for high-tech careers. Numbers may not be available for the last 7 years but you can bet things are far worse now.
So here is the jobs scorecard for 15 years:
2,250,000 S&E jobs were created
-6,525,000 Americans graduated with S&E degrees
—-
-4,275,000 jobs deficitPut another way, we graduated more than 4 million science and engineering grads than the job market needed. Corporations also fired a lot of them, which is not counted in those numbers. What kind of shortage is that?
During this time what was the U.S. government doing to help the problem? Well, at the same time millions of S&E grads couldn’t find jobs in their chosen profession, the government was solving an alleged “shortage” by importing vast numbers of H-1B and L-1 visa holders, and if that wasn’t enough they were giving even more jobs away permanently by handing out millions of green cards. Also, let’s not forget they were also giving incentives for companies to move jobs overseas.
So where does this all leave us? What impact does this have on those of us who aren’t engineers? Well, I’ll tell you. (And I welcome comments and corrections from anyone with more than my pedestrian grasp of economics!)
First of all, the H-1B and L-1 visa industry is rife with fraud. I’ll illustrate. Mom-n-Pop Consultants want to hire a new engineer, but don’t want to pay through the nose to get him. A local immigration lawyer [q.v.] has an ad promising access to skilled labor at a reasonable rate (much lower than market wage). Mom-n-Pop calls up said lawyer, who coaches Mom-n-Pop on how to get access to a half-billion-strong pool of potential workers. All Mom-n-Pop has to do is advertise for said engineer, and either undercut the prevailing wage, or simply find a reason to reject all otherwise-qualified American applicants, following (on their face) all of the federal regulations for employment-based visas. When – surprise, surprise! – nobody who will work for what is offered can be found (or whatever contrived reason for a lack of qualified applicants is given) our stalwart immigration lawyer assists Mom-n-Pop in getting their H-1B engineer fast-tracked in from Pakistan, India, what have you. The benefits to Mom-n-Pop are legion: they get (maybe) the same skill set for 20-50% the direct cost (i.e., salary); they can recycle this guy once in three years, then exchange him for one of his compatriots in six, and even with the costs associated with filing the applications and renewals, the salary and benefit savings more than make up for it; and if the poor foreign schlep complains, Mom-n-Pop can just terminate his visa and get another poor foreign schlep who won’t complain. [And the larger the company, the larger the incentive and propensity for – and impact from – abusing the system]
Second, it increases chain migration. The guys brought over can transition their H-1B status to resident alien status, and it’s not terribly difficult to do so. Or, say Schlep #1 has a fiancée back home, whom he marries and brings over. They have kids, who (due to the current misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment) are then citizens. They can use the “American” children to push the processing of their resident alien paperwork, or just stick around until the kids are old enough to sponsor them as citizens, when they wouldn’t have had that ability if they hadn’t come here as H-1Bs. And then, they can sponsor someone. And then, they can sponsor someone. And so on…
Third, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Third World countries don’t exactly tend to be enamored of the Rule of Law. Citizens thereof tend to mistrust the government, and see, for example, laws and regulations as something to be “gotten around” rather than adhered to, police as “enforcers” rather than protectors. In short, their traditions are not socially and politically compatible with the middle-class, republican society we’ve built over the last few centuries.
Fourth, recent immigrants – and their families – tend to drive down salaries in whatever industry they enter. Whether strawberry pickers from Guatemala or IT wizards from Indonesia, they come in for less, and end up staying for less. While the greatest examples of this can be found in low-skilled labor, it is increasingly noticeable in highly-skilled areas. If they stay for less, the products and services they contribute to or provide cost less, right? Costs go down, cost of living goes down, inflation goes down, and everyone can get by on the new, downward-adjusted economy, right?
Nope. Prices don’t change (or, at least, they don’t go down); everything costs the same, but the native consumers are making less, because they’ve been replaced and can’t earn as much outside their fields. But, hey, corporate profits go up! That keeps the displaced workers warm at night, knowing that corporate executives are making bank by stomping on the throats of those Americans who made them successful in the first place. So now, the native consumer goes into debt (ahem – further into debt) to make up the difference. More debt leads to devaluation of the dollar, as debt means the issuing bank is essentially printing more money; further devaluation means higher prices for goods and services.
This is known as “inflation.”
Eventually, the meddling Fed will monkey with interest rates to stave off, or at least minimize, inflation. Hopefully, this will entice those foreign countries holding on to massive amounts of dollars (eg, China, Japan) to continue doing so, instead of dumping their dollar reserves (maybe switching to the euro) and crashing the greenback… but don’t hold your breath. Either way, you end up at a baseline currency value that’s much lower than it was before, a cost of living that’s much higher than it was before, and more limited ability to reconcile the two, because the job market is saturated with foreign nationals and resident aliens who are all too happy to do your job for (read: instead of) you.
But those executives are still sitting pretty, on top of the world.
And after it’s all said and done, you could still make ends meet – washing dishes or mowing lawns. If, that is, you can underbid the wages of the illegals that are already doing “the jobs [visa holders] won’t do.”
