Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 22:33:34 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: masterful PR campaign To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter The industry lobbyists appear to be on a full-court press now. We're seeing pro-H-1B press reports and op-eds with increasing frequency (unfortunately, I haven't had to time post most of them here), and I just heard today that Rep. Lofgren is now circulating a draft of a bill to give automatic green cards to new STEM grads of U.S. universities. The article enclosed below reports on an updated study by Stuart Anderson, showing that many Intel Science Fair finalists are children of former H-1Bs. The intended message is that not only is America's current tech innovation dependent on importing foreign workers, but those foreign workers are raising children who turn out to be brilliant scientists. As I've written before, this message sent by the PR people is far from the true state of affairs: * The imported workers are not more innovative than Americans. * The imported workers from China and India do tend to have extremely ambitions for their kids, and are especially fond of contests like science fairs. Thus it is no surprise at all that many of the finalists are offspring of Chinese and Indian immigrants. * The winners of the science fairs are not brilliant. They are good, smart kids who work insanely hard, but in most cases they're simply doing the leg work, implement the ideas of the established scientists who are mentoring the kids--NOT the kids' own ideas. For the first point above, see my recent talk at Georgetown University, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/georgetown.pdf For the second point above, see my article on the original Anderson study in 2004, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WhizKidsMyth.txt Not much has changed in the interim, except that now the Bay Area does have schools that groom kids for these contests. (Of course, one new aspect is that the nation has now seen the Tiger Mom, showing just how much some Chinese and Indian parents do push their kids.) For the third point above, see my analysis of Obama's State of the Union Address, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ObamaStateOfUnion.txt (scroll down to "Super Bowl"). Again, these kids work extremely hard and must be given due credit, but the image of them as brilliant scientists, projected by the H-1B advocates, is not accurate at all. But think about it from the point of view of Obama and people he talks to. For those of you out there who are techies, you have to keep in mind that most policymakers couldn't write a C algorithm to save their lives. Obama is an obviously highly intelligent man, but I'll bet he stayed away from the science and math courses when he was a student at Columbia. Many policymakers are mesmerized by the techies. Then the policymakers are told that the foreign workers get more patents per capita, etc., and they spawn brilliant children who will revolutionize the science world. Then they are told that "Johnnie can't do math," another distortion (see my analysis of the Obama speech). Just look at the press quote from the Obama speech (see above link), Obama was so impressed with Amy that he kept talking about her for days after he met her. So, even without the big industry campaign contributions, it's not hard to understand how Obama and his aides could be completely bamboozled into thinking, "We had better grab these foreign workers and get them to stay here! U.S. technological leadership depends on them!" It's a masterful piece of PR; the industry lobbyists have really outdone themselves this time. Norm http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_18124146?source=rss&nclick_check=1 Children of recent immigrants lead America's scientific competitions By Lisa M. Krieger lkrieger@mercurynews.com Posted: 05/23/2011 06:36:45 PM PDT Updated: 05/23/2011 09:16:15 PM PDT Quantifying what has long been obvious in Silicon Valley, a new analysis shows the majority of America's top high school science competitors are the children of new immigrants. The report, released Monday by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, found that about two-thirds of the finalists at the Intel Science Talent Search -- the Nobel Prize of high school science -- were born to parents who hailed from either China or India. Only 12 of 40 finalists at this year's competition -- a national contest based on solutions to scientific problems -- had parents who were born in America. "The benefit America derives from the children of immigrants in science and math is an additional advantage the country reaps from being open to talent from around the world," said author Stuart Anderson, director of the organization and a former head of policy at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The results are evident in Silicon Valley classrooms: Children of immigrant parents, particularly those with skills-based H-1B visas, are abundant in the top tiers of academia. "You see it here in Silicon Valley. It's like planting a vigorous sapling and giving it Miracle-Gro," said Menlo Park father Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information and a native of India. "Here you take the cream of the crop," from their birthplace abroad, "then put them in some of the best schools in the world "... these students are really, really competitive and work very hard, inspired by their parents, and represent all the American ideals." The winner of this year's competition was a home-schooled youth of American-born parents from Danville named Evan O'Dorney. But the largest number of Intel finalists -- 16 -- had parents who hailed from China. Ten were born to Indian parents. There was also one finalist whose parents were from Iran, and another from South Korea. To put the numbers in perspective, Chinese comprise only 1.0 percent and Indians 0.8 percent of the American population. So if contest winners were proportionate to their population, there would only be one child of an Indian or Chinese parent every 2.5 years -- not more than 10 in one year. Of the finalists' immigrant parents, almost all came to the United States on H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreign nationals to work here. Most H-1B visa holders hold at least a bachelor's degree, and many have advanced degrees. Three of Silicon Valley's 2011 finalists were born to parents from India: Amol Aggarwal of Saratoga; Rohan Mahajan of Cupertino; and Nikhil Parthasarathy of Mountain View. One local finalist, Andrew Liu of Palo Alto, has parents from China. "It doesn't surprise me if you look at the quality of people coming here," said Wadhwa, who is also director of research in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. "They tend to be highly educated. And the vast majority have STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees." For instance, both of Nikhil's parents have Ph.D.s. His father works at Microsoft, studying signal processing. His mother, an organic chemist, teaches chemistry at the Harker School. There is another characteristic linking families here on H-1B visas: the motivation to regain status at the top of the economic ladder, lost when they immigrated to the U.S., Wadhwa said. "The families are upper echelon. They leave their country at the top of the social ladder, then come here at the bottom," he said. "As an immigrant, you are treated differently, and you have to struggle, and work harder, to catch up again. "They watch their parents work hard and struggle and then they gain the same motivation," he said. "They seek to prove themselves to their families." Having a foot in more than one culture may inspire new ideas and interests in young people, noted author Anderson. Finalist Rohan Mahajan, whose Indian father works for Cisco, researched methods of improving the efficiency of photo-electro-chemical cells, which could improve solar energy. Something much more simple also motivated him. "I got interested in energy production,'' he said, "because whenever we went to India the power always went out." Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-920-5565. ORIGINS of YOUNG SCIENTISTS A new analysis of 2011 Intel Science Talent Search finalists shows the vast majority have parents who are new immigrants. Here are their countries of origin: China: 16 United States: 12 India: 10 Iran: 1 South Korea: 1 Source: National Foundation for American Policy.