To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Wed Feb 20 21:01:28 PST 2013 I've mentioned the unconscionable situation in lab science a number of times, most recently in my Bloomberg op-ed, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-12/glut-of-foreign-students-hurts-u-s-innovation.html Here is an (almost) excellent blog on that issue: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-americas-awful -market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339 The posting is very good, except for its conclusion: "Most these Ph.D.'s will eventually find work -- and probably decently compensated work at that. After all, the unemployment rate for those with even a college degree is under 4 percent, and in 2008, science and engineering doctorate holders up to three years out of school had just 1.5 percent unemployment." This is HIGHLY misleading (though presumably not deliberately so). First of all, though the PhDs may be working three years after the doctorate, the author's own data show that manyy are working as post docs, at low pay. And more importantly, there is the opportunity cost. Remember, the NIH report I cited in the Bloomberg piece said the median age at starting a career after the series of post doc jobs is 37. (Elsewhere in the document, they said 42, but I took the lower number.) That means that the person has gone through 15 years of low pay/no pay after the bachelor's degree--and thus has forgone 15 years of real-world salary. Given that people of PhD quality are often bright, resourceful people, this means a loss of several hundred thousand dollars! Not to mention the personal costs, e.g. postponement of starting a family, neglect of family, angst over one's uncertain future, etc. A glut is a glut, any way one slices it, with the unavoidable consequences that gluts bring. And as I pointed out in my op-ed, the NIH and GAO are aware of the role of H-1B as one of the major causes of this glut. Yet both major parties are anxious to exacerbate this glut, with expanded foreign worker programs. They would give a STEM visa/green card to ALL foreign STEM grad students. As I showed in my analysis at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/CworldInfoworld.txt this would be a huge number of people, without any regard to quality. In my posting earlier today, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/OthersAreSelective.txt I said, "Being at MIT, [the two researchers highlighted in the article] would qualify as the best and the brightest in anyone's book. But does that mean we should give special visas to Master's students at San Jose State?" This is not to imply there are no talented people coming out of San Jose State. But if the STEM visas are aimed at facilitating the immigration of the best and the brightest, the California State University campuses, and most UCs, shouldn't be included. Originally, a rather high-ranking official in the Obama administration stated that Rep. Lofgren's bill would only cover the top dozen universities in the U.S.--but 12 turned out to be 200+. In my post earlier today, I noted that China has a special program to lure back expatriate techies--but it has been accepting fewer than 20% of the applicants. In essence, that's saying that Congress wants to give red carpet treatment to foreign workers from China that the Chinese government doesn't deem of high enough quality to entice back home. What does that say? Norm