Michael Moritz on immigration reform
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sequoiacapital.tumblr.com
Whether you're for immigration reform or not, let's not ignore the Econ 101 here, and let's call a spade a spade. There is no such thing as a "shortage of engineers." The state and federal governments have spent literally a hundred years subsidizing the technology industry by building massive public research universities that pump out thousands of engineers each year. My alma mater (Georgia Tech) is precisely one such institution. When companies talk about a "shortage of engineers" what they mean is that there is a shortage of people willing to work as engineers at the prices they would like to pay. Of course, it's Econ 101 that if they raised the prices they were willing to pay, the number of willing suppliers would go up.
I'm actually in favor of skilled immigration. My dad was an H1-B, and I have very bright friends who came here to study and struggled to get sponsorship. However, claiming that anyone who opposes the status quo is simply xenophobic is disingenuous. Let's not pretend that there isn't a trade-off between limiting labor supply to maintain wages and expanding it to make the U.S. a more attractive place to start a technology company.
It is the people of the United States that defend our borders, and it is therefore the right of those people to decide who gets in those borders and who does not. The people are entitled to decide for themselves what kind of trade-offs they want to make re: immigration, based on what benefits them the most. One can make a credible case that the U.S. is in danger of losing it's place as an attractive place to start a technology company if we don't allow more skilled immigrants. One can also make a credible case, without any xenophobia necessary, that we already do a lot to create a large supply of engineers in this country, and that the U.S. is not in any danger of losing it's attractiveness at the moment, and that we'd rather enjoy the higher wages that come from limiting the labor pool.
Although, I agree with your general point, I want to point out that the way the American system works, it is not exactly designed to figure out what the people want. Immigration is an interesting point where both Democrats and Republicans are under intense pressure by lobbyists to make sure high end immigration keeps flowing in (which cynical me agrees with you is for wage depression.). On the other hand, they completely ignore the fact that a huge swathe of the population has falled into the cracks with both border security broken and the fact that illegal immigrants have made a life for themselves here but have none of the benefits of a citizen.
I don't know how much of that money goes to engineers, but I do know that more than a handful of my engineering friends have been lured to defense. It would be interesting to a study that tried to quantify the distortions, though.
Employing engineers in defense has the opposite effect of a subsidy: it takes engineers out of the commercial job market thereby decreasing supply and raising prices.
From that wikipedia article you linked: "In standard supply and demand curve diagrams, a subsidy will shift either the demand curve up or the supply curve down. A subsidy that increases the production will tend to result in a lower price, while a subsidy that increases demand will tend to result in an increase in price."
Defense R&D increases the demand for engineers and thereby raises their "price". I don't know if it has a significant effect though.
The government employing engineers is strictly speaking not a subsidy. It's just an increase in demand. Yes, one type of a subsidy does result in an increase in demand. But causing an increase in demand is not a necessary&sufficient condition for being a subsidy. Because now the government is demanding engineers. It does not decrease supply. Someone who is employed is still by definition part of the labor market. The only person who is not a part of the labor market is someone permanently not looking for work.
Neoclassical economics suggest moving up the price ladder. But as a comment above mentioned, STEM job supplies are quite inelastic. In fact we should expect it to be inelastic, since STEM jobs require more expertise than say general labour.
there are other options any fixed price x(i): no trade (not one), and equilibrium (no more). If X is floating, the question is different. Then its a question of why X wages are not enough. Its also a question of why the jobs are not made better (not everything is price related, the firm is a hierarchy...). etc.
an elite investor like mike moritz, however, cares less about constraining costs and more about planting seeds, that is ensuring the brightest minds launch companies in silicon valley. he makes money when entrepreneurs dream of and execute against audacious ideas that change the world. people like sergey brin and andy grove. billion dollar ideas and teams, the ones he generally invests in, can attract financing and are not more likely to succeed if labor costs dip. in other words, most of his failed investments did not fail because labor costs were too high.
while there may not be a shortage of engineers, there may be a shortage of quality engineers. degrees do not guarantee talent or quality. i graduated with dual degrees in computer science from stanford, yet if i had pursued a career in software development, i would have been at best a good engineer -- not an elite one. the stripes, facebooks, and googles of today are seeking world class engineers. not merely good ones. this is the crux of mortiz's argument.
I went to one of the more well-known STEM magnet high schools in the U.S. Lots of very bright kids, total immersion in science and technology. Looking back on my class 10 years later, I see way more people in finance, consulting, law, and even accounting than in STEM. Until the recent Silicon Valley salary wars, the tech industry just didn't pay salaries sufficient to compete with those other industries for graduates. Contrast my brother, who graduated from the same school, and recently from one of HYP. Tech attracted a lot of people in his class. And it's obvious why. Salaries at the top software companies are now quite attractive relative to any other industry besides Wall Street (and a lot of people would take a 50% paycut to work for Google rather than Goldman).
Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. have illegally agreed to not poach each other potential engineer therefore keeping their wage down.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565425-38/apple-google-a...
They can pay more, they just don't want to, because why pay more when you can pay less to get the same value?
Google attracts engineers who want to work on interesting things _and be paid extremely well for doing so_. Period.
my point is this: they want people who want to be at google, and offering a lower salary (or not the highest salary) is one way of filtering for those people -- because they are willing to take less compensation to work at google.
working at google and working at citibank are like two products on the market. if you value one more than the other, you're willing to pay more -- that is, accept lower compensation.
of course, they will pay more for engineers they deem valuable (as in your example) and even mercenary exceptions who are supremely talented and well-suited for a strategic task.
but this doesn't invalidate the notion that a lower base salary helps filter out people who assign little value to working at google.
if they value google employment more than citibank employment, they're willing to pay more, that is accept lower compensation. beyond world-changing projects, there are benefits to google employment that attract developers -- things like free restaurant-grade food, the google stamp on a resume, and bright, motivated co-workers.
if these intangibles diminish in value and cannot any longer offset the lower cash compensation, people leave.
"Everyone knows that the remarkable achievements of the foreign born have led to the formation of companies such as Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, nVidia, Yahoo! PayPal and scores of others. Of the last eleven early stage companies that have allied themselves with Sequoia Capital, seven have had immigrants among their founding lineup."
They also explicitly say on their website that they invest in Gen1 companies: http://www.sequoiacap.com/us/about/gen_1
Importing skilled workers not only floods the local market but creates a shortage in foreign markets to depress those countries abilities at effectively forming their own industry.
This is in the investors best interest as it increases their ROI, but it isn't beneficial to our local workers, nor is it beneficial to the origin countries of our imported workers.
As an immigrant working in the construction sector and I can say that the "shortage of tradesmen" is genuine and widespread, which creates an exponential increase in wages and job costs. I receive in company benefits (estimated at my cost) monthly around the same figure as my monthly income, which is likely the point when an industry is in desperate need of new workers.
Those benefitting from higher wages are not the people of the United Stated who defend the borders, just the small fraction of the people who happen to be software engineers. All the rest of the people of the US are hurt by this, since they have to pay more for the goods and services to which the software engineers contributed.
PS: Rayiner's argument is despite a surplus of engineers people still want to increase the H1B cap and they want to do that to save money.
I don't know about the "unemployed" claim. Is there any data on this? The existence of some unemployed engineers does not mean there is not a shortage of engineers. They could be grossly incompetent. Or they are part of the level of unemployment that is considered normal. That's why 4% unemployment is considered to be "full employment."
Wages have most certainly not stagnated in the tech industry.
(As a side note, I personally have never met or heard of an actually unemployed software engineer, i.e., a person who was able to write code and was looking for a job and couldn't find one. Not only in the US, any of the countries I've lived in. Unemployment in Poland in the early 2000s was at times above 20% and yet I've never heard of an unemployed computer programmer, despite the fact most of the people I was hanging out with were computer programmers.)
I think there's something like 5% unemployment amongst computer programmers in the US. Based on experience with (ex-)coworkers, that number can easily be attributed to people who are looking for programming jobs who aren't competent enough to hold a job. In fact, that unemployment number should probably be higher, and I shudder to think what kind of crappy unmaintainable code is being written by those programmers who really should probably be unemployed (or at least in another field.)
In short, our need for programmers doesn't come from some lack of people willing to work for a certain salary; it comes from a lack of people capable of doing the job.
Now Progamers are in much higher demand, but even still the percentage of programmers that stick with it for more than 10 years is fairly low.
Let's start with whether non-engineers should subsidize the salaries of engineers through implementing protectionist policies at their own expense in terms of more expensive products? This isn't an obvious answer. Presumably, protecting the salaries of engineers through strict immigration policies also protects the salaries of doctors, factory workers, accountants, taxi drivers, bankers, lawyers, teachers, agricultural field workers. In other words, doesn't it protect the salaries of everyone, across the board?
Does the cost of excluding foreign trained engineers end up being paid back to everyone when their salaries get subsidized as well?
What do people do with their salaries? They buy services and stuff, and the vast majority of the costs can be traced ultimately to expenditures on labor. In fact, it is counter intuitive, but greater capital efficiency in terms of automation and software for example (developed by engineers) makes the non-labor inputs relatively cheaper in comparison to the labor inputs, and explains why real income and measures of quality of life have surged over the past 50 and 100 years.
How do we know that it isn't just an act of faith to believe greater competition for wages doesn't hurt people more in terms of lower salaries than it helps them in terms of decreased costs? That's a comparatively simple answer—people are only hired if the opportunity cost of not hiring them is greater than the cost of their entire compensation package. In other words, if you make $100k in your job, someone who managed not to go out of business is under the impression that not having you would make them lose out on more than $100k of revenue.
Economic growth comes from a greater number of transactions, where the surplus value from what the work is worth is greater than what the effort is worth. Growth does not come from constraints on supply. The immigrant who is paid $80k for work worth $120k takes out $80k, but contributes $120k of work. The original worker, took out $100k, and contributed the same $120k. The aggregate economy is $20k richer, and it is spread out to everyone, because consumption and production balance out.
One of the ways to counter the inevitability of actors making rational decisions that end up making everyone worse off is through the setting of effective public policy with an eye to aggregate benefits.
I think it is very safe to assume that the point of funding engineering education was that engineers' work is valuable to society, not that people who can make it through intrinsically merit certain salaries. If acquisition of talent through immigration is another channel, so be it.
The idea of education subsidies is also interesting to consider. On one hand more people are able to choose the career, so the skills are less scarce, and salaries are lower. On the other hand the increase growth in the community of trained people allows for greater sophistication, cooperation and specialization, which leads to more valuable output, and higher salaries.
Not necessarily. Letting in immigrants with tech skills to compete with software developers should reduce salaries. But letting in immigrants with tech skills to found companies should drive up demand for software developers.
What assumptions? Do people who are neither software engineers nor VC fund owners not own cell phones? Do they not use Google and Facebook? Etc. etc.
Too few people graduate with the skills for highly technical, quantitative, or scientific careers, and therefore the supply of those skills relative to demand drives a very high premium.
So why hasn't it happened? Many of those in favor of a "comprehensive" solution are wary of letting the most popular parts of immigration reform pass individually, lest they end up with the less popular remainder (some form of normalization for existing undocumented immigrants) standing on its own and thus harder to pass. Similar logic worked against passing a real "DREAM" act prior to the President's somewhat dubious selective-enforcement scheme.
Relatedly, there's a strong feeling among some reform advocates that focusing on skilled labor from Europe or Asia at the expense of unskilled labor from Central and South America is yet another example of discrimination and at least metaphorical fence building. Why help those who are already well off enough to get a college degree in the U.S.?
> Why help those who are already well off enough to get a college degree in the U.S.?
You answered your own question. It's about skills, not how much money the immigrant already possesses. The proof is in how famous India is for sending over tech entrepreneurs, despite being otherwise maligned by stereotype in many of the same ways that those from Central and South America are. They are able to come over and work here in the U.S. because they possess skills which are desired.
If you look at immigration practice as being simply that anyone who wants to come to America and work hard should get a fair chance, then that is probably unfair. But there are those who argue that we should be selective and prioritize towards those who would contribute most.
But I suppose all of this just adds to your argument that there's many competing factors in play here, even for a topic as obvious as this.
Honestly, this happens today too. I recently acquired permanent residency through the diversity visa. The process was not fun for me and I am well educated and was able to hire a good lawyer. The number of inconsistencies in documents, the myriads of rules that one should follow all play into the favor of people who are already well educated, probably have deep pockets. This bugs me from a practical standpoint because if America is going to be anything other than a high-end service economy, you need the ability to let wage competitiveness to exist on all scales of the spectrum. Obviously from a ethical standpoint, this is highly unfair and a loaded die.
One other factor is the preceived threat of wage imbalances acting against U.S. non-naturalized citizens ("We'll be flooded with H1B's who will work for 25% less and undercut our sons and daughters!").
I suspect that the "keep your job or you're gone" nature of H1B visas creates much more downward pressure on wages than increasing the supply of skilled workers does. Regardless, we want growth in industries that require skilled workers. I'd rather have 5 million software engineers in this country making $80K on average than 3 million making $100K.
But there are those who argue that we should be selective and prioritize towards those who would contribute most.
I can see the other side's argument about fairness, but to me it's a slam dunk that you invite in people that are likely to produce economically a large multiple of what they consume in benefits. I'm happy to figure out what to do about unskilled labor, too, but coupling the two seems counterproductive.
1) This bill will remove per-country quotas for Employment Based Green Cards. Just look at the backlog right now and imagine what would happen if these quotas were removed.
2) The cost of applying for H-1b will be INCREASED. What that means is that small companies and start-ups who struggle with hiring engineers will have to pay more for each one of them. It used to be 2-3K/application and for a small company it might be pretty substantial. At the same time companies like Wipro and Infosys will not even notice this increase.
3) The bill does not really help people who graduated here to STAY in the US. Yes, it will make it easier for them to get a visa, but what they really need is their green card. I was on H-1b for many years and the only thing I wanted during these years is to get my green card ASAP and start my own business.
Take a look at Canada's startup visa that just was introduced. They bring new jobs to Canada by giving permanent residency to people who want to start businesses and CREATE jobs (not take the existing ones). Current US bill will NOT allow entrepreneurs to stay in the US, it will only help to bring more cheap labor from overseas, but will not solve the problem of talented people leaving the country.
Looking at the backlog, I notice that two countries where 1/3rd of world's population resides are over-represented. Removing the per-country quota reduces the decades-long wait which people from these countries have to put up with.
Tying US citizenship with graduate work will incentivize universities to treat graduate students like slave labor, moreso than they are already. This is a recipe for exploitation.
I'm simply suggesting thinking through the consequences rather than simply cheerleading.
For example, would we be comfortable with 90% of science students being not from the US?
What if we make a system where no one born in this country can actually afford to do graduate work?
Remember, the foreign-born students don't have the kind of undergrad debt load that we have in the US.
Most foreigners grow up with far fewer resources than you did in this country. The USD is still stronger than 99% of currencies. While I don't dispute that college education is ridiculously overpriced here, that is a different, unrelated problem.
Is it good for the country to disincentivize graduate work for people who are born here?
Is it good for the country for every STEM lecturer to have bad english language skills?
This is already the norm at many state schools, and makes people drop those subjects because they can't understand or relate to their teachers.
Of course it is hard for immigrants to relate to the spoiled "fat" americans, but the social and cultural realities exist and are not trivial.
Fixing education here in the U.S. is itself an important task but it's orthogonal to immigration. If our kids want to do basket-weaving instead of STEM then the next best thing is to let those from overseas who want to come to the U.S. and work actually do so. But there should be plenty of capacity in the universities for non-immigrants to get STEM majors if they want. At least I had no difficulty.
Despite all the mud the U.S. has on its name internationally, the country is still in a great position to execute a "brain drain" (for lack of a better term) and it would be pretty foolish to miss out on that, especially as the world becomes increasingly specialized.
That's a pretty incredible kind of Godwin you just invoked there.
This instantly makes the degree more valuable to the foreign student. Thus the university can extract more work for lower wages from them.
Wages for teaching are not set by individual professors, and thats where most of the poorly compensated labor is.
Maybe it's worse for PhDs or at better (research) universities?
What would you recommend we do as a result of considering them? Without getting a more substantial position from you, this reads like concern trolling.
The article is sketchy on the details so I assume they are talking about extending this benefit to Masters students. I am not so sure how I feel about this. For every school that is highly competitive and tries to bring in the cream of the immigrant class, there are enough schools that use the Masters program as a way of injecting an easy $100K into their coffers.
Having said this, I can say one thing from personal experience though: Universities are way better at treating their students than the H1B system. At least at my university, the way the system was setup, you would have to really fuck up for you to get kicked out of Grad. School and this is one of the top ten C.S. schools. On the other hand, the way the H1B works, your manager might not like the fact that you sit and you get fired and you are immediately out of status. This means that you work constantly with that pressure in your head. If you are in the unlucky situation of having been born in India or China, this runs for a few years. This is not something you will hear people from industry clamoring for reform.
Right now the people become slaves of the companies they work for because their immigration status is tied to their companies.
You think its the option between not getting exploited and getting exploited by the university, but in reality its the option between getting exploited by the companies which sponsor work visa vs getting exploited by the university.
Finally, why can't you leave the choice on the people themselves, you're helping the immigrants in anyway by not allowing corporations or universities to be able to hire them easily.
It looks like Stripe has decided hiring foreign workers is the only solution to the problem instead of trying to find another solution. There are _plenty_ of good programmers who could work for Stripe in the US, maybe they just aren't attracted to the company, to living in SF, don't know about the company, etc. Maybe they should think about their hiring process more generally rather than waiting on hiring some particular group.
There is plenty of tech talent in the San Francisco area (shocking! I know) and people are free to switch jobs. If Stripe offered competitive-enough compensation, they should be able to attract them.
And so we focus on those we know to be good. Some of them live outside the US; some grew up outside the US and now live here; some are US natural-born US citizens. We're performing a BFS of our personal networks. Sometimes, visas get in the way.
Increase your compensation level and the talent will find you.
What does work well? As a lot of organizations have found, personal referrals from people you trust. Which is what Stripe sounds like it is trying to do. Which returns us to the grandfather's point that they are identifying people that they want, and then are unable to hire them.
What other profession would that work for?
e.g., s/engineer/day-care-provider . I need to hire a good day care provider, and can't find one. But I know a good one in another country. Laws get in the way of my hiring them. Let's change the law!
See https://plus.google.com/114613808538621741268/posts/bNrjdAWp... for my actual opinion on what I'd like to see happen. (It never will.)
Seriously people need to understand that "hiring foreign workers" thing thrown around is simply a myth. I'm a foreign engineer working for a US-based software company, and I make more than my coworkers AND that is on top of what my H1B application and renewals cost the company in terms of lawyer's fees and HR costs. So why did my company hire me? Because at the time they couldn't find any Americans for the position.
Sorry if I just call you out on your bullshit.
A general rise in wages would help somewhat with the number of new programmers being trained, but that only explains the number of people entering STEM versus non-STEM majors. But we'd be totally ok if everybody who enrolled in college in engineering graduated with a degree in engineering. A big problem is that engineering degrees suffer from high attrition, and I suspect that's because teaching undergraduates is a profit center for the English department but a cost center for the engineering department (it distracts grad students from bringing in research grants).
Still, Congress generally feels that the US's technology related industries are more important than other industries, and so are privileging it. I'm not going to complain about someone doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, so I'll just applaud and hope that they do even better next time.
That makes no sense. Hiring people from outside the US is harder, slower, and more expensive than hiring US citizens.
We just care a lot about working with the best people, and we're willing to spend months obtaining visas for them in order to do that.
If Stripe was known for producing lots of subtly substandard work, I'd have a very different impression of them.
I by no means oppose expansion of skills-based grounds for legal immigration to the United States. Mindful that all of my own ancestors arrived to the United States (or to the pre-independence colonies of Britain) in an era before there were any restrictions at all on immigration here, I'm generally quite supportive of expanded immigration to the United States. That improves the local cuisine, the local music, and the local economy in general. Mindful that my wife was able to find a legal channel for immigration to the United States (based on that status of being my wife, in that case) and that many of my friends and neighbors are first-generation immigrants to the United States, I am also aware that there quite a few channels to legal immigration to the United States already, some of which already strongly favor people with STEM degrees or STEM work experience. I'd be glad to see more people like that come into the country--that would be good for my personal local business of teaching mathematics to the children of people who are aware United States K-12 education underperforms (see my user profile for more details on that). But the tricky issue will be setting detailed criteria for immigration on those grounds and perhaps (or perhaps not) an annual number of visas issued on those grounds that fit an overall sound immigration policy for the United States.
Anyone who doesn't think a simple policy proposal like that of the blog post kindly submitted here might be subject to abuse and fraud needs to think again. Immigration to the United States is very highly desired, and some people will cheat to attain it. There is no particular reason for United States voters to vote to make immigration any easier than it has to be to achieve some generally agreed national policy goal, despite own my pro-immigration opinions.
As to the questions you raise about how to define the requirements (what is foreign-born national, what is advanced degree, what is STEM), a possible start is the current "advanced degree exemption" for H1-B which currently grants an additional 20,000 H1-B visas.
I am aware that those get filled up pretty quickly too but it illustrates my point that you can define some sort of requirements to answer the questions you raise. In this case, the requirements are: - degree must be from accredited US university/institution - master's degree or higher - foreign national (which is different than foreign-born national) is anyone who is not a US citizen or permanent resident
Well, at the price you're willing to pay anyway. Try competing with banker bonuses (or even gasp VC pay) and watch the population shift.
Sounds like he's all for capitalism until he has to open his own wallet.
There is a shortage. A capitalist believes that price solves supply issues. Are you not capitalist? Do you prefer a centralized planning, say from a gov't program to import people?
However I have to admit it would probably reduce the wages of similarly skilled existing workers at least in the short run. This is basic supply and demand: more supply means lower prices at least in the short run.
For example would skilled US programmers be paid as much if any skilled programmer in the world could come here compete for their job? Probably not just look at the prices for contract programmers in India, Eastern Europe, China, etc.
However in the long run almost everyone should be better off because the flip side of lower prices is greater volume: more innovation, economics growth and employment as well as lower prices. There are other less understood benefits such as immigrants increased likelihood to start businesses.
Also in the long run it won't matter as much where people are located. Eventually most US skilled workers will be competing with similarly skilled workers throughout the world. So we might want to adapt to this future reality now as it will only get harder in the future. People piling up student loans need to know what future wages will be.
Overall I think we should be willing to take the risk and accept some disruption now. It should help almost everyone in the long run and it will happen in some form anyway. But I can understand people's reluctance to personally bare the costs.
1) discrediting the public education model
2) demanding more public money for educators
3) demanding more public money to subsidize employee training
[1] See: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
The thing is that immigration might increase supply, for a specific job, but there's the complementary goods/etc. aspect to people with different skills in entrepreneurial tech work, so it overall increases jobs available.
(I do think some US schools underperform, but the big funding disparities seem to have been addressed. Demographics are a big thing, but it would still be good to figure out causes of and correct the lower performance of various minority groups, vs. just accepting it as natural)
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.
3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"
http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/
dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."
The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf
with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...
The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf
and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.
4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf
consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not "tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.
This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."
The Census Bureau says
"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm
5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.
Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf
Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf
Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,
Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...
so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.
Many of her research colleagues were effectively deported (forced out of the United States) after graduation if they could not find a firm willing to sponsor them. Sponsorship is itself an exploitative and extremely costly endeavor. Many small companies cannot afford it.
The situation seems to me a travesty from every angle I can conceive.
The author of this article paints the situation adequately, but I want to add a few more points:
1. Since many of the more xenophobic among us Americans are strongly motivated by national defense, I find it especially important to paint the following picture for their consumption: educating these bright minds in the United States and then sending them packing may in fact exacerbate national defense. Considering how many engineering students arrive to our universities from nations we are fearful of (rightly or not) such as Iran and China, it seems especially naive to educate their brightest to the pinnacle of our ability and then send them home--especially since they want to stay here.
Similarly, if your aim is to keep your enemies weak (and again, I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that it may be what the more xenophobic among us desire), then certainly creating a brain drain within their society serves us at their expense.
2. A commonplace misguided belief that economics is a zero-sum game may also explain some xenophobia. This colloquially takes the flavor of, "they are taking our jobs." The only way to combat this is through repeating the point that immigration creates jobs. We as Americans are better off having these highly-educated job-makers in America than overseas creating and enriching companies that may end up competing with our own.
As a free-marketer, I am not all that motivated by such an "America over everyone else" point of view, but if that IS your point of view, then again you should want these bright people staying here and creating jobs or bettering our firms rather than overseas in the hands of our competition.
3. It's quite frankly inhumane in many cases to send these students packing. Even in the relative squalor that they endure living, for example in Los Angeles on mere hundreds of dollars a month, they still want to live here and create a family here. The American dream exists in their eyes. Sometimes I think of those who were sent back and wonder whatever became of them, but I cut those thoughts short because no happiness comes from that.
4. Just as a minor point, can you imagine the feeling of being kicked out of the US after earning your Ph.D. here? I imagine it might breed a tinge of America hatred when they get back home.
And what of the billions of people in the world who are even worse off?
Erm...so? No offense, but someone could trip and get hit by an American made automobile and develop a hatred for America. Not that you don't make other valid points but this is not something that motivates anyone to support immigration.
Namely, that by kicking people out of our members-only club, we might be breeding resentment. You're right, though, any number of other things could contribute to the same.
Absolute, shameless liar. http://peoplemov.in/
Foreigners desirous of US citizenship similarly favor "immigration reform" for self-interested reasons.
The marks here are American tech workers (and American workers in general) who buy into various elite rationalizations for why labor needs a pay cut so people like Moritz can pile up more billions.