USA automatically issue a green card to STEMS graduates

Over the years in the USA, there has been discussions about automatically issuing green cards (permanent residency in the USA) to foreign students who have earn an advance degree science, technology, engineering or math from accredited schools . The purpose is to keep highly educated people in the United States.

What would have been the impact in the USA if in the late nineties, such a bill had passed Congress and was signed by President Bill Clinton? My memory of that time period was the the internet companies had a lot of clout and wanted a way to increase the supply of skilled people. Lets assume that the green card holder can bring over their spouse and children once the green card is issued.
 
My wife is an electrical engineer, so let me just state what she tells me unequivocally: There is no such thing as a shortage of American STEM graduates in this country. Those internet companies only wanted to increase the supply of STEM grads in order to drive down the cost of labor.

Having said that, what would happen if foreign STEM graduates were issued green cards upon graduation? At some point you are going to see American citizens with STEM degrees toss a Holy Hand Grenade into the political scene.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
 
Heh, this will hit the Clintons and the "New Democrats" hard among white-collar people by 2016 if they did it. You would have seen "Engineers for Trump" or "White Collars for Trump" in greater numbers.
 
My wife is an electrical engineer, so let me just state what she tells me unequivocally: There is no such thing as a shortage of American STEM graduates in this country. Those internet companies only wanted to increase the supply of STEM grads in order to drive down the cost of labor.

Having said that, what would happen if foreign STEM graduates were issued green cards upon graduation? At some point you are going to see American citizens with STEM degrees toss a Holy Hand Grenade into the political scene.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

This. A thousand times this. STEM degrees are not lacking, there's no shortage of people in the field. Plenty of smart people already have degrees, they however like to be compensated for their work and intelligence and get in the way of companies' bottom lines.

However, the Silicon Valley crowd is smart enough to realize outsourcing is toxic, so they push the myth of, "I'd love to have American workers...but there's nobody to hire! So I just have to hire these Indians...who coincidentally are happy with slashed salaries."
 
Might have been a good thing then actually.
Have the effects of immigration on the job market be more widely spread instead of concentrated on lowskilled jobs and there might have been an earlier more broad and moderate push to restrict it. Instead of the gates staying open due to the middleclass being mainly unaffected until eventually there's a populist revolt.
 
My wife is an electrical engineer, so let me just state what she tells me unequivocally: There is no such thing as a shortage of American STEM graduates in this country. Those internet companies only wanted to increase the supply of STEM grads in order to drive down the cost of labor.

Having said that, what would happen if foreign STEM graduates were issued green cards upon graduation? At some point you are going to see American citizens with STEM degrees toss a Holy Hand Grenade into the political scene.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

This. A thousand times this. STEM degrees are not lacking, there's no shortage of people in the field. Plenty of smart people already have degrees, they however like to be compensated for their work and intelligence and get in the way of companies' bottom lines.

However, the Silicon Valley crowd is smart enough to realize outsourcing is toxic, so they push the myth of, "I'd love to have American workers...but there's nobody to hire! So I just have to hire these Indians...who coincidentally are happy with slashed salaries."

The truth is much more complicated than this. Yes, there is a shortage, but not in the way of "missing degree". Yes, the degree is just an excuse but there is an argument to be made for shortage.

The reason is too many Chiefs, not enough Indians. Basically, companies need people willing to do dirty work or intellectually unsatisfying work. Who would want to spend years and years doing theoretical proofs and math (what most STEM degrees are) then spend the rest of their lives doing vendor-specific grunt work with Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce or what have you. Who wants to spend all those years training to be a manager or a boss, but then become a code monkey? Who wants to be a villager when you can be a lord or a king? Some people might, but not all STEM grads.

The usual answer of that, from people like your wife is "pay enough money and I will do anything". No, that's not true, at least not from business people's perspective. If you pay loads and loads of money, all that will happen is people will "tolerate" the work, possibly do it subpar because they are unhappy with it, then leave at the first opportunity. There is also the problem I call "know it now". You are worth X dollars if you know it, right now, instead of taking 3 months or 6 months or 12 months to learn it. A highly theoretical degree with a lot of math and science doesn't necessarily help with using X software or knowing Y new technology. It could and it should, but it doesn't always. That means ramp up time. But, business can't afford ramp up time, because money waits for no one. So they want to take the Indians, because their degrees include very vendor specific software specific knowledge. That is the definition of a true shortage, not just money or some great conspiracy.

Basically the problem will ALWAYS exist, because taking higher education is a calculated risk in the Western world. You take it, to get more money and a better job and a better life, which in most people's minds does NOT include coding or programming or even engineering (there's a reason why a lot of engineers go into sales... it's because they consider it a better lifestyle that coincidentally pays more money because that's the way capitalism works). It is not accurate to make assumptions like, "if only they paid more money people would take the awful jobs"... what kind of life would you want, working 9-5 (really 10-4) where the vast majority of your time is talking and analysing and making decisions, or working 8 to 6 (REALLY starting work at 8) where the vast majority of your time is grunt work or learning the latest new technology? The answer is obvious.

So the answer is, yes you need more people with STEM degrees, but not because of lacking degrees. Degree is a necessary but not sufficient condition, what is sufficient is far more elusive. Because, only a small percentage of people are actually willing to do the grunt work, and the work has to be done, somehow. My view is that offshoring and outsourcing is good, because it allows those people who want to be bosses and managers people to boss around :).
 
There's another issue which hasn't been mentioned here - training people up to the standard you want is expensive, so where possible companies like to get in people who have already been trained up by others. In an environment where you an bring in an unlimited number of workers, you will always be able to recruit people from a low-wage economy who have been trained in it (your reference to ramp-up time). The problem is, in the long term it has a really pernicious effect - nobody will train new engineers, and that means in the long run you don't have new senior engineers coming through the system. At that point - once your existing ones retire - you've either got to import the seniors too (at which point you may as well shut down your entire Engineering operation and move it to a low cost country - this happens a lot) or you've got to ramp up what you pay to poach the few remaining ones from other companies.

This has been happening in the UK for a number of years - companies weren't willing to pay for training and relied on a cohort of engineers who are largely now retired or retiring, so we're now in the position where I'm a Principal Engineer responsible for budgets of over a million a year at the age of 35 - because they can't find anybody more experienced to fill the role. They're starting to understand just how grave the problem is now, and you're seeing a lot more spending on apprenticeships and new graduates in recent years - but there's an enormous demographic hole in the middle of UK engineering.

I think strangecircus is also greatly overstating the problem of finding people willing to be code monkeys - there are loads of them out there, but you're looking in the wrong places. There are a large number of people who aren't terribly academically inclined, but are quite capable of (and happy to do) the majority of the grunt-level work. Traditionally they came into the business via apprenticeships rather than degrees, which really reduces the risk of training since companies pay for it - and it also means you can tap a group of people who tend to have somewhat different priorities in life, which tend not to involve climbing the greasy pole.
 

Asami

Banned
There'd be a pretty hard backlash against this in the 21st century, and Trump (or someone like him) would get a lot more voters than he already did. There is no short supply of native-born STEM graduates, and bringing in more people on free greencards (or H1-B visas, as per OTL) is just causing more issues than it solves.
 
There's another issue which hasn't been mentioned here - training people up to the standard you want is expensive, so where possible companies like to get in people who have already been trained up by others. In an environment where you an bring in an unlimited number of workers, you will always be able to recruit people from a low-wage economy who have been trained in it (your reference to ramp-up time). The problem is, in the long term it has a really pernicious effect - nobody will train new engineers, and that means in the long run you don't have new senior engineers coming through the system. At that point - once your existing ones retire - you've either got to import the seniors too (at which point you may as well shut down your entire Engineering operation and move it to a low cost country - this happens a lot) or you've got to ramp up what you pay to poach the few remaining ones from other companies.

This has been happening in the UK for a number of years - companies weren't willing to pay for training and relied on a cohort of engineers who are largely now retired or retiring, so we're now in the position where I'm a Principal Engineer responsible for budgets of over a million a year at the age of 35 - because they can't find anybody more experienced to fill the role. They're starting to understand just how grave the problem is now, and you're seeing a lot more spending on apprenticeships and new graduates in recent years - but there's an enormous demographic hole in the middle of UK engineering.

I think strangecircus is also greatly overstating the problem of finding people willing to be code monkeys - there are loads of them out there, but you're looking in the wrong places. There are a large number of people who aren't terribly academically inclined, but are quite capable of (and happy to do) the majority of the grunt-level work. Traditionally they came into the business via apprenticeships rather than degrees, which really reduces the risk of training since companies pay for it - and it also means you can tap a group of people who tend to have somewhat different priorities in life, which tend not to involve climbing the greasy pole.

I would agree that companies are not taking the responsibility of education and training seriously, but arguably they shouldn't have to. When you have margins of 1-5% and every quarter it's live or die by the stock price, and your competitors cut on education, what can you do? It's either go bankrupt or match that type of short term thinking. Nobody sends anyone on conferences or training costing thousands of dollars anymore, it is basically assumed you can pickup the learning on your own somehow on your own time. Isn't that the point of a degree, that you can learn anything in a short period of time independently?

I also don't think I am overstating the Chiefs versus Indians (no pun intended) problem, because that is the crux and heart of the entire problem with education... it's a calculated risk, a gambit, not just a random decision. People take painful difficult education expecting some kind of payoff and ultimately, an easier more satisfying life. My interpretation, that all those STEM grads are working in non-STEM fields because they want to, is just as valid as the other interpretation, that they are working in non-STEM fields because they don't pay enough (for which I see no proof at all, not the low salaries, but the assumption that with higher salaries people would give up their cushy 10-4 job with no stress for a high stress technical job). I would agree that you can get people "without degrees" or who came up a different path, but since *most* people want a better life or an office job, this problem will exist forever, so long as capitalism exists. Because the whole point is to get a better life for yourself.
 

Puzzle

Donor
My interpretation, that all those STEM grads are working in non-STEM fields because they want to,
There's the side issue that a STEM degree from a US university is often indicative of a lot of generally useful skills that are highly valued. In addition after ten or fifteen years most engineers are in less technical and more managerial roles it makes sense they'd jump if they're no longer using their profession based skills.
 
I would agree that companies are not taking the responsibility of education and training seriously, but arguably they shouldn't have to. When you have margins of 1-5% and every quarter it's live or die by the stock price, and your competitors cut on education, what can you do? It's either go bankrupt or match that type of short term thinking. Nobody sends anyone on conferences or training costing thousands of dollars anymore, it is basically assumed you can pickup the learning on your own somehow on your own time. Isn't that the point of a degree, that you can learn anything in a short period of time independently?

Companies actually should take more part of this, because if they don't, then society has to step in and pay for it. And society eventually cracks apart, torn by too much strain brought by egoism.
A STEM degree shows you're a fast and flexible learner, true, but does not give anybody the right to dump on you the cost, in workhours and monetary, of learning stuff used by the company to generate profit. Want somebody who already knows it? Select (and give an adequate payroll, I must add) for it beforehand.
 
There's the side issue that a STEM degree from a US university is often indicative of a lot of generally useful skills that are highly valued. In addition after ten or fifteen years most engineers are in less technical and more managerial roles it makes sense they'd jump if they're no longer using their profession based skills.

Companies actually should take more part of this, because if they don't, then society has to step in and pay for it. And society eventually cracks apart, torn by too much strain brought by egoism.
A STEM degree shows you're a fast and flexible learner, true, but does not give anybody the right to dump on you the cost, in workhours and monetary, of learning stuff used by the company to generate profit. Want somebody who already knows it? Select (and give an adequate payroll, I must add) for it beforehand.

I agree with most of this, I'm just trying to play devil's advocate for globalisation and free trade. The subtle point I am trying to make is, outsourcing and offshoring isn't the threat it's made out to be, because the alternative in most cases would be the job doesn't exist as compared to the job being filled by someone else if giving "adequate payroll" means over the marginal cost. If we are talking ambigious "Internet Companies" and IT, then it is very obvious... outsourcing and offshoring is the eventual goal of all business people. Arguably business services and professional services is sustainable and the most underdeveloped with greatest potential in the Western world. Business services scales with people, you get better at it over time (mostly), and it's all soft skills. You could have 1x onshore STEM graduate leading a team of 5x offshore people, and that one person would have more rewarding and interesting work with more decision making and a better career path. That is a sustainable model, not the old model where people with 30 years of experience get paid the most and can be lazy and the people at the bottom get screwed, or whatever other model others think of.

I see no proof that paying extra money will attract people to take on more stress, more pain, longer hours and more importantly spend years in a dead end type of job poor for their career. In fact I am sure this is the first lesson business people learn, that extra money doesn't equate to extra work or extra quality. And that is their field, (dealing with money, paying money) so they are probably right. If STEM is not their core business, then they have a right to at a minimum outsource to consulting companies, and after that offshoring is just a step away.

Trump represents protectionism, anti-immigration and arguably union fat and apparently his arguments carry a lot of weight with ordinary people (which is why he won). I am not swayed by these types of arguments, not at all... not when a GitHub account is the definitive answer of programming skill, and that is already global. A degree is not a guarantee of a job or a promise of a job.
 
I would agree that companies are not taking the responsibility of education and training seriously, but arguably they shouldn't have to. When you have margins of 1-5% and every quarter it's live or die by the stock price, and your competitors cut on education, what can you do? It's either go bankrupt or match that type of short term thinking. Nobody sends anyone on conferences or training costing thousands of dollars anymore, it is basically assumed you can pickup the learning on your own somehow on your own time. Isn't that the point of a degree, that you can learn anything in a short period of time independently?
In the US, possibly. In the UK, I've already done one week-long training course this year and if there was anything else helpful I would have got it. In France or Germany I would probably have got a telling off for not doing enough training.
What that argument entirely misses is productivity - a well trained workforce will be more productive and innovative than an untrained one, meaning that in the long run if you train and retain your workforce they will be of more economic value to you than a poorly trained, transient one. That is particularly true in Engineering where a problem has usually already been solved at least once - experience and training lets people go straight to the answer, allowing them to do in an hour or two what it would take someone without the experience months to achieve.
It's also notable here that you're focussing on software development rather than engineering - despite the fact that programmers like to call themselves "software engineers" the skillset required is very, very different and skills far more portable than in actual engineering.

I also don't think I am overstating the Chiefs versus Indians (no pun intended) problem, because that is the crux and heart of the entire problem with education... it's a calculated risk, a gambit, not just a random decision. People take painful difficult education expecting some kind of payoff and ultimately, an easier more satisfying life. My interpretation, that all those STEM grads are working in non-STEM fields because they want to, is just as valid as the other interpretation, that they are working in non-STEM fields because they don't pay enough (for which I see no proof at all, not the low salaries, but the assumption that with higher salaries people would give up their cushy 10-4 job with no stress for a high stress technical job). I would agree that you can get people "without degrees" or who came up a different path, but since *most* people want a better life or an office job, this problem will exist forever, so long as capitalism exists. Because the whole point is to get a better life for yourself.
The problem there is that you're subscribing to your own definition of a "better life" which includes being paid lots of money and bossing other people around. Lots of people out there - probably the majority in fact - don't subscribe to it. For the majority "bossing other people about" is regarded as a total headache, and how much they earn (provided it is enough) isn't actually a big factor in whether they're happy to do their job compared to the people they work with and how nice their boss is. By the time you hit my age group (mid thirties) pretty much all of the non-grads are happy to go with the flow and I'd say more than half of the grads have decided that they'd rather stick in specialist engineering roles rather than trying to climb the management ladder. I'm at the bottom if it now at the moment actually, with a team of zero but a budget of a million or so Euros to "improve system Y" (how being left up to me), and I'm still not sure whether I want to climb it much further although the opportunity is certainly there.
 
In the US, possibly. In the UK, I've already done one week-long training course this year and if there was anything else helpful I would have got it. In France or Germany I would probably have got a telling off for not doing enough training.
What that argument entirely misses is productivity - a well trained workforce will be more productive and innovative than an untrained one, meaning that in the long run if you train and retain your workforce they will be of more economic value to you than a poorly trained, transient one. That is particularly true in Engineering where a problem has usually already been solved at least once - experience and training lets people go straight to the answer, allowing them to do in an hour or two what it would take someone without the experience months to achieve.
It's also notable here that you're focussing on software development rather than engineering - despite the fact that programmers like to call themselves "software engineers" the skillset required is very, very different and skills far more portable than in actual engineering.

The only reason the talk is software is because that's what's relevant to the OP. Yes, engineer is a legally protected title, everyone knows that, but what's not obvious is you do not get the title straight out of school... the licensing body grants it. Green card or lack of it isn't the gate but experience and professional courses AFTER the STEM degree.

So, of course the discussion is about Silicon Valley and "Internet Companies", and corporate IT departments, in other words unregulated work. And in that context everything is self-taught. I see no reason why regulated professions should fear green cards or immigrants or offshoring or fresh grads at all, because a job that needs a legally protected title will always be gated by the licensing body. Feel free to correct me.

The problem there is that you're subscribing to your own definition of a "better life" which includes being paid lots of money and bossing other people around. Lots of people out there - probably the majority in fact - don't subscribe to it. For the majority "bossing other people about" is regarded as a total headache, and how much they earn (provided it is enough) isn't actually a big factor in whether they're happy to do their job compared to the people they work with and how nice their boss is. By the time you hit my age group (mid thirties) pretty much all of the non-grads are happy to go with the flow and I'd say more than half of the grads have decided that they'd rather stick in specialist engineering roles rather than trying to climb the management ladder. I'm at the bottom if it now at the moment actually, with a team of zero but a budget of a million or so Euros to "improve system Y" (how being left up to me), and I'm still not sure whether I want to climb it much further although the opportunity is certainly there.

It's not my definition of "better life" but rather some sustainable model other than the experience model which screws the new hires and keeps the fat around which doesn't work. This idea of "good enough" isn't sustainable either, because a market is point in time and doesn't care about what laurels you won years ago. Business services is scalable by population, lucrative and of course high pay. There's a reason why the more developed an economy is, the more financial services and business services it has. It may not be what you or I like or accept, but it is the reality. And those business people have needs that are met by technical people the part you call "bossing around" isn't boss more than asking them to solve your need (you certainly don't tell them how to do it). "Build it and they come" doesn't work, there has to be a problem worth money solved. This is simply the reality that many technical people refuse to accept (including me sometimes). This "definition" is simply the reality that technical people serve business needs.

If it's a "total headache" then a modern first-world economy is a "total headache" to most people, which may be proven by Trump's win. But it doesn't change the reality. Perhaps "going with the flow" as you put it doesn't work in this social media aware, brand focused reality.
 
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