American students are bored by math, science, and engineering. They buy smartphones and tablets by the millions, but don’t pursue the skills necessary to build them. . . . Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career involving science, technology, engineering, or math, known collectively as STEM, according to a survey of more than a million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling . . . when the need for those workers is soaring. – New York Times editorial 12/7/13
Fact Check: With this claim the Times displays a theme quite common in pro-immigration propaganda. Basically, it’s that Americans simply don’t want to work anymore, so we must let multitudes of foreigners in to do the jobs we refuse to do. Commonly, we hear this about blue collar jobs and other work involving manual labor, which supposedly we’re too lazy to perform. But also we hear that Americans are too mentally lazy to do white collar jobs, such as those in STEM fields.
Are there any jobs Americans will still do? Actually, there are. In reality, native-born Americans are the majority of workers in just about every job category in the U.S., with agriculture and a few other occupations being the exceptions. Thus, when immigrants take jobs in America, they are doing jobs that Americans are not refusing to do. And in these jobs, particularly low-skilled ones, they are competing with American workers.
But they are also competing in STEM fields as well. To keep wages low and profits high, STEM companies have successfully pressured Congress to let them bring in foreign workers. As a consequence, many American STEM graduates can’t find work in those occupations.
The survey cited by the Times claiming lack of interest in STEM was conducted by ACT, the organization that administers a college admissions and placement test. This study was highly flawed, as recently noted by prominent demographer Michael Teitelbaum. He pointed out that it contradicted other studies, and that ACT later admitted that the study was inaccurate and produced another study correcting its errors.
Said Teitelbaum, “So it’s not that the New York Times editorial writers made it up. It’s just that they only looked at one of the studies, and maybe they liked the finding. It was consistent with their opinion—so they quoted it.”
The Times claims that it prints only the news “fit to print.” Perhaps. But the Times’ opinion pieces consistently ignore facts to fit the cheap-labor mass-immigration agenda of corporate America.