I think you raise interesting points; there is, however, historical precedence, I think, for encouraging immigration in certain fields; I understand that foreign doctors have been given immigration preference for some time.
There is some historical precedence. However, I'm not sure if we have any precedent for what is happening in engineering. Medical, MBA, and even law schools do admit international students, of course, and engineering graduate programs should too. Our schools would be much weaker if we limited ourselves to US born students, and the experience of all students would be poorer for it. But the percentage of US born students has dropped so severely in graduate engineering programs that I think we're in uncharted and dangerous waters here.
When I was a grad student in engineering at Berkeley (about a decade ago now), I become accustomed to being the only person who grew up in the US in class, study groups, and so forth. For the reasons I described above, I think this is a dangerous situation for the US. In fact, I actually think that our graduate engineering schools (this is based on my limited experience at Berkeley) are starting to assume a European or Asian type of undergraduate preparation, where students tend to specialize earlier, than an American one, where we do more general education and specialize later. While I actually think that Americans from top undergraduate colleges are very well educated, they probably aren't at the same point in their particular branch of study as international students who have studied their subjects more exclusively as undergraduates, so we may soon be at a point where the structure of US graduate education in engineering is less accessible to people who have come up through our own education system.
By analogy, supposed you majored in English and went to law school, having never taken a law class. That's how it works in the US. Now imagine if 95% of your classmates spent the last 4 years at Oxford studying common law, including substantial amounts of study of the US legal system. Well, you'd struggle no matter how wonderful an undergrad student you'd been. I think this structural shift is well underway in US based graduate engineering programs.
Interestingly, US students do enroll in undergraduate engineering programs, because those degrees pay. They just tend to avoid graduate programs in favor of law, business, and medicine - and if you look at the numbers, it's hard to conclude that this is not a highly rational decision.
I considered engineering and looked at the numbers and concluded, rationally I think, that the pay was not in line with the amount of work necessary to obtain the education. There are easier ways to make more money, so why bother?
I'll grant you that money isn't everything. I'm sure some would argue that I don't love engineering enough to do it anyway, and the field is better off without me. Maybe they're right, but I figure there are other areas that can be interesting and suffer from less of the wage and job pressures engineering is facing. You can imagine my surprise when I started to get excited about engineering and then I did my research and found the 'shortage' is really not so dire or real as public pronouncements had me believe.
I think it's a complex problem and would agree that dismissing any doubts against it as being largely xenophobic is a little unfair. I don't know what the answer is, but if we really want American born engineers we should recognize that we have a problem here. If we don't mind importing them, maybe this is a cheaper way at the cost of pushing Americans into other fields.
William Zumeta, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington, produced a pretty good paper addressing the "so be it" argument (ie., the argument that if Americans wish to abandon science and engineering in response to market signals, what's the problem?).
"...to the extent policies do respond to perceived shortages, they tend to be shortsighted and exacerbate longer run problems. This is true of recent policies that simply expand the number of visas granted to foreign scientists to fill empty job slits in industry, and of government R&D support policies that pay little heed to impacts on graduate students. Expanding imports of young scientists to fill empty slots at bargain wages dampens the market signal that more opportunities and higher salaries would provide to domestic talent..."
Zumeta also gives some numbers on what top S/E undergraduates are doing instead of graduate engineering programs (interestingly, it isn't law, it's generally MBA or health professions. Of course, there's a potential complication here - Zumeta is only tracking S/E grads with quant GREs above 750, so he isn't considering the undergraduates who decided earlier on that engineering isn't for them (I suspect the US starts to lose most of its engineers in 8th grade).
I'm glad you agree that accusing people like Zumeta of being "xenophobes" is a little unfair (I think it's more than a little unfair, really, it's a pretty horrendous way to use personal attacks to suppress what should be a fair, honest, and open discussion). But a lot of very high profile writers (Moira at Business Week, for instance), continue to do this.
Zumeta's article does a good job of citing many of the conditions I personally noticed when I considered heading more in that direction. I would be surprised if H1B's and other programs have no effect on wages and job opportunities in this field (though I know some counter that they don't).
One argument I imagine people make is, assuming H1B and other visa programs suppress wages, and this in turn retards the desire for young Americans to get into these fields, why is this a problem?
I suppose one could argue that restricting immigration will lead to higher wages, which ultimately will lead to more engineering students, but at a much higher expense. Ultimately this won't be globally competitive and is unnecessary when there are plenty of students from elsewhere in the world who will do equal caliber work at much lower cost.
I suppose one could argue that, but I wouldn't. Intellectually though, I'm hard pressed to say why our engineers really should be American born in larger quantities than they are today. I suppose we've all been witness to what happens when we push bright individuals into finance instead of engineering. It doesn't necessarily end up being advantageous innovation.
I re-read Zumeta's article, and you're right, there is no discussion about why it's important to have Americans in these fields. He says that these fields are important, that we should be concerned that Americans are choosing to pursue other career paths, and that programs like the H1B are reducing the incentives further. But I'm not seeing an argument about why the US shouldn't just go ahead and staff all these positions with relatively poorly paid foreign nationals on visas.
This reminds me of Phil Greenspun's (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) opinion
"What's my idea for changing the incentives? I don't have any. I'm not one of the people who complains that there aren't enough women working as professors, janitors, or whatever. For whatever reason we've decided that science in America should be done by low-paid immigrants. They seem to be doing a good job. They are cheap. They are mostly guys, like other immigrant populations. If smart American women choose to go to medical, business, and law school instead of doing science, and have fabulous careers, I certainly am not going to discourage them. Imagine if one of those kind souls that Summers was speaking to had taken Condoleezza Rice aside and told her not to waste time with political science because physics was so much more challenging. Just think how far she might have gone..."
Personally, I'm not nearly as cavalier about this, because I think that the availability of cheap foreign labor in a critical field is a short term phenomenon. India and China are already starting to lure back their students, and this trend will increase. I wouldn't be surprised if the day comes where India and China are hiring away US born engineers - it's still decades away, but it may well happen.
Some would say "ok, then market incentives will increase, and Americans will start to return to engineering." Sure, but slowly. I personally don't think it's quite that easy. It's more a question of population dynamics. Think of a species that has been reduced greatly in population... the passenger pigeon was headed for extinction without intervention even when large flocks were still observed.
Engineering takes time, effort, a system, a pipeline, mentorship, and so forth. Basically, it takes people like my grandfather (an engineer) encouraging me to take up the profession, and me encouraging my son, daughter, nephew, the kid on the street, to take it up too. I think that if you break this chain severely, it can take generations to restore it to health, if you manage to do it at all.
It seems easy to import engineers right now, but it won't always be so. There was that story about Hemingway asking a man how he went bankrupt - the reply was "I went bankrupt slowly and then all of a sudden". I think the cheap availability of talent is what masks the destruction of this profession, and I think the US could very quickly find itself in an very bad position.
I think that ensuring a healthy, engaged, optimistic domestic pipeline of engineers should be a top priority for the US, and our policies seem to be giving us the oppposite (by the way, a healthy percentage of international students and practitioners enhances this, the problem is when the US interest starts to plummet to dangerous levels).
