We believe it borders on insanity to train intelligent and motivated [foreign] people in our universities—often subsidizing their education—and then deport them when the graduate. Many of these people, of course, want to return to their home country—and that’s fine. But for those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let’s roll out the welcome mat. — The New York Times 7/10/14, by Sheldon Adelson, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
Fact Check: Here this trio of billionaires repeats the tired old line that there aren’t enough Americans to fill jobs in science and technology, so we need to invite foreigners to do it. More and more evidence, however, shows otherwise. Someone with a good grasp of this evidence is Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University. Writing in Forbes magazine, Teitelbaum notes that respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute have not been able to find “any evidence of indicating current widespread labor shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations. . . .”
He also notes that “U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Teitelbaum adds that if there were really a shortage of workers in these fields, the wages level in in them would have risen significantly, but mainly they are stagnant or show growing.
Far from too few Americans qualified in STEM professions (science, technology, engineering, and math), statistics from the Census Bureau indicate an oversupply. Only a third of Americans with an undergraduate STEM degree have a STEM job. More than five million of them work in other fields, and 1.2 million more are either unemployed or out of the workforce.
Companies perpetuate the myth of a labor shortage because they prefer to hire foreigners, either ones trained here or ones trained abroad and admitted through the H-1B visa program. The foreigners, for a number of reasons, are more willing to accept lower wages than Americans and put up with more with difficult working conditions.
What the companies are doing, so that billionaires like Bill Gates can get richer, is deny jobs to Americans that can provide a middle class living. As Ron Hira, a public policy professor at Howard University, observed, “STEM degrees . . . have been pathways to the middle class. It’s been a traditional path for working class kids to study. . . . By cutting this off, we cutting off that path to upward mobility for so many of the working class kids.”
As long as the labor shortage myth persists, Americans who seek jobs in science and technology will suffer a shortage of employment.