To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Thu Apr 4 20:13:00 PDT 2013 Interesting piece at http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_04_05/caredit.a1300063 on a forthcoming EPI study of the possible effects of legislation to "staple a green card to diplomas," i.e. grant instant green cards to STEM foreign students. I'll make a few comments here, and then wait for the paper to come out. But to set the stage, take a look at a site, run by the Association for Computing Machinery, the main computer science professional organization. The ACM is very pro-industry, and openly biased in favor of H-1B, just as has been the case for the Computing Research Association, a university research consortium. Its news digest site, http://technews.acm.org often has items on pro-H-1B stories; I can't remember ever seeing a single case of critical articles being cited. Indeed, the above Science Careers article won't be listed, I'm sure, even though Sciece Careers is run by the august Science Magazine. I've written before that the person who was ACM president some years ago was highly interested in working with me on the tech age discrimination issue--until I told her it was fueled by H-1B, which she said she didn't want ACM to touch. And yet...The ACM does run its own careers news site, http://www.acm.org/membership/careernews/archives/acm-careernews-for-tuesday-april-2-2013/ and it is remarkably frank, showing that the market for computer professionals is NOT a seller's market. Just consider the headlines in the current (April 2) issue: "Five Ways to Job Hunt Using Social Media," "Avoid an Emergency Career Crisis," "Over Half of IT Workforce Unhappy with Salary," etc. This certainly doesn't look like the "labor shortage" picture held by the inhabitants of Capitol Hill. Add to that the point in the Science Careers article that STEM salaries have been flat since 1998 or so, a finding similar to that of EPI's Daniel Costa for the computer and math fields. Swelling the labor market via "stapling," of course, would make things much worse, with a downward trend in wages, not just flat. Bill Gates once said that if Congress wanted to deliberately harm the American economy, the best way to do it would be to restrict tech immigration. But it ought to be clear that just the opposite is true. "Staple a green card" would result in STEM being, paraphrasing Yogi Berra, "so crowded that nobody goes there anymore." Recall the internal NSF document I keep dragging into the conversation here, in which (a) it was proposed to bring in lots of foreign students, in order to suppress PhD wages, and (b) that the resulting stagnant salaries would drive Americans away from PhD study. Both (a) and (b) came to pass, and are quite consistent with what Salzman et al are predicting in their comments to Science Careers. As I wrote in my Bloomberg piece a couple of months ago, it's not true that "the more, the merrier." Flooding a labor market can drive out good people from the field, as the NSF document correctly forecast. If "staple" is enacted, it will give us academics lots more to do research on in the coming years, but the odds are that it will be more toward the "post mortem" genre. The 1950s cry, "Who lost China?" could well become "Who lost the tech industry?" Far fetched thought? Maybe so. But we'll see. As the paper quoted by Science Careers points out, no one really knows just what impact a "staple" law could have, but the authors seem to say the available evidence is grim. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/EffectsOfStapling.txt