To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Thu Feb 14 21:54:08 PST 2013 The other day Professor A. Mushfiq Mobarak wrote a blog on the NYT, which you can read at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/immigration-and-innovation His actual academic paper is downloadable at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02543.x/pdf If you don't have the technical background (and even if you do), you may wish to skip the math, but read the rest. Although I have problems with various aspects of the methodology and feel that Dr. Mobarak has miscited some of the references in his paper, I'd like to point out here a different aspect that I think is quite interesting. Readers here will recall my Bloomberg piece that ran earlier this week: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-12/glut-of-foreign-students-hurts-u-s-innovation.html (Unfortunately, Bloomberg changed the title. They originally called it "Glut of Foreign Students Hurts U.S. Innovation," but later changed it to "How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation." That new title is harsher, in my view, even if the difference is subtle.) My theme was that although there are some really brilliant foreign students in CS/EE, on average they are weaker than the Americans, as detailed in my forthcoming EPI article. The point is that I ended my piece as follows: "How does the U.S. begin to fix this imbalance? Rather than offering work visas and green cards to all foreign students attaining U.S. postgraduate degrees, legislation should focus on facilitating the immigration of top talent." What is remarkable is that Prof. Mobarak's paper makes largely similar remarks: "...from the perspective of US science education and innovation policy, visa restrictions for foreign students should not be applied uniformly or on the basis of financial means; they ought to account for student-quality differences." "High-quality scholarship students are particularly valuable from the perspective of US innovation policy." "That the quality of international students has a significant impact at the margin implies that US student-visa policy may be misguided if an important objective is to expand the research capacity of American universities. Rather than relying largely on a demonstration of financial wealth sufficient to support graduate study and return home, a key criterion for issuing a visa could be indicators of student quality (easily measured by admission with scholarship to top-ranked programmes) independent of assets or incomes." Our two viewpoints are not quite the same. Though my op ed mentioned universities admitting foreign students if they can pay, that really was not my main point (in contrast to Prof. Mobarak and his coauthors). Actually, most PhD programs in engineering generally have "full employment" of their students, so ability to pay is not an issue there. Unfortunately, the Mobarak research uses scholarships as a proxy for quality, and this is far too coarse. He uses research publications as his measure of quality of "output," a measure I've rejected for reasons I've given before. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that current proposals in Congress to give "STEM green cards" to ALL foreign grad students in STEM is far too broad a measure. Norm PS: Some of you may recall that last October, my university moved its e-mail adminstration to Gmail. That's fine, but it's caused problems for my e-newsletter, under which a significant minority of subscribers are not receiving my postings. I'll try to fix this when I get a chance, but in the meantime, if you know any fellow subscribers, you may mention that they should resubscribe under an alternate e-mail address.