I think that's exactly why people are focusing on IT. The H-1B program is meant to allow companies to hire foreigners with rare skills that are hard to find domestically. In reality it's abused to import cheap labor and undercut average American workers doing common work like building applications or administering systems. There should be no problem continuing to hire PhDs and other foreigners with actual unique skillsets at $130k.

Really? How much should it cost to do common work like building crud applications or administering systems? Right now, (based on all the H1-B, and similar visa holders I know, which is a good amount) it's ~2X the median household income to pay one visa holder to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to make $200-300K to sling crud apps and keep the lights on in a datacenter.

You're applying your software-dev tainted view of salaries to the sciences - how much do you think a typical PhD-holding research scientist earns?

And it would open the field to American women. When math and science professors can't make a decent living to support a family until after their prime child bearing years, any claims of equal treatment and equal opportunity are nothing but a sham. Science careers today practically demand that women permanently give up any hope of a family just to get on the professor track.

And things are just getting worse. It's time to stop importing foreign science grads.

To me the educational system is clearly broken, most schools in USA are unable to produce quality talent. One of the things that annoyed me was the love of multiple choice tests .. i never encountered one in academia until i came to the USA. What, they tell you the answer when you take the test? Whats the point of the test?

Until USA fixes education system ground up starting from the elementary school to high school to college there will continue to be a need for talent from outside of the country. Until teaching becomes a highly respected and competitive profession (see Japan) - things will not change.

There is a lot of demand for smart well educated people in this country and Since America does not have enough of these people inside (see last election results lol) there will continue to be a flow of brains from the outside of the country.

We said "multiple choice" only to the foreigners and the most uptight profs. They're properly called 'multiple guess' by American students.

If companies are limited to domestic scientists then they'll quite happily move their R&D departments to countries with more relaxed immigration laws. Foreign universities will happily take the best researchers from around the world that are denied work in the US.

We're seeing this in the UK from the Brexit fallout. We were getting the brightest from around Europe working in our research labs. Now that we're going to make it more difficult for them they're probably going to go elsewhere.

The elephant in the room isn't why aren't more universities accepting 'local' students. No department would choose a foreigner over a local. You wanna know why? How much the student is going to cost them. Foreign students never qualify for in-state tuition (well at a state school anyways) and right off the bat are much more expensive to their advisor's budget. Local students can also apply for NSF Graduate Fellowship, and bring in their own funding, something most foreign students can't. Both of these factors make it so that the first preference is to hire local.

That said, in a large number of departments (especially in CS, and other sciences) you see a burgeoning international student population. Why? There just weren't enough decent local applicants to go around and science needs its foot-soldiers.

That's not really true. The basic problem is that while a foreigner can take a US PhD and apply for a fairly prestigious job in their home country, an American with a US PhD gets their career stuck in a rut. Multiple post-docs, for low salaries and long hours, followed by a desperate rush to find a job in a national lab, an industrial lab, or academia. There are hundreds of applicants for each permanent job, and even if you get a permanent job, you're not really guaranteed job-security (tenure). Many "permanent" jobs are even on soft money, which means if you fail to bring in enough grants (and grant rates have fallen dreadfully low in recent years due to Congressional budget cuts), you're a "professor" who can't pay for food or housing.

American academia relies too much on having legions of cheap grad-students to do much of the footwork, and then throwing those "students" out of science entirely when they graduate. It also relies on Congress actually funding the NSF, NIH, NASA, etc. at rates proportional to how much science is being done, which of course nowadays Congress steadfastly refuses to do.

American science careers are in crisis because the career model has become based upon exploitation: getting as much cheap labor out of as many people as possible before throwing them away.

The keys are, above all, good recommendations from respectable academics and some kind of research experience followed by high undergrad grades. A high GRE score can't substitute for any of those.

Of course, the foreigners can manufacture the grades and recommendations with a little cash. Maybe even the research experience. They probably do have to study English to pass the standardized tests: The one that matters for them is the TOEFL.

Wow. Do you have any source for this? I would love to hear one. DO you have ANY idea how difficult it is to get an application accepted at a top tier grad school? Especially if you are an international student? We have to compete against millions of our own country folk at our local examinations, which are way more difficult than the american equivalents. Google IIT-JEE for a starter, and probably try to solve a few sample questions. We work hard to get to where we are and don't expect/feel entitled a job/education just because we are born in a certain country. No one is conspiring to keep local students out, it just happens to be that when graded on a uniform scale (set by the universities themselves (Not every foreign institution's scores are accepted)) the international counterparts are better. With respect to my credentials and experience, I was a grad student from India in one of the tier one schools and work as an architect in the Big 4. You see a huge international presence here in the big companies frankly because we compete at a completely different scale than what you would like to think. I have interviewed enough people to not judge them based on where they come from or how well they can talk english.

It's much harder in America because it doesn't matter how you do on the examinations. Your fate is decided by personal opinions and relationships and what your local school thinks of you. There is no simple IIT exam or A-level or Baccalaureate or Sooneung where you can just study hard, write a great exam and get admitted.

How we dreamed of the ease foreign students had with their exams! Instead it's a deep dreary slog of obsequiousness, obedience, busy work, group projects, supplication, and being seen but seldom heard. And the results are secret evaluations you're never entitled to see and which are never documented in public.

But that's all for undergrad.

The fact remains that the only exam that matters much in top tier grad admissions for US schools is the TOEFL and that's only for foreigners. Documented research work experience is much more important than any test.

There is no reason why we should send a freshly graduated physics scientist back to Uganda or whatever because he can't find an employer willing to pay him/her some abstract 130k salary straight out of school (which is A LOT OF MONEY).

Again, when I hire - I do it strictly based on skills and experience. If I have to do a bit more paper work to get this talented guy work for us I'll do it - but there is a limit. And at 130k limit a lot of these brains will flow back overseas. It would be a huge mistake for USA to get rid of willing to work just talent like that.

edit: and not all locations in America pay the same amount of salary for tech workers either.

Indeed. The $130k limit should be raised to $310k in SF, NY, DC, LA, and Boston.

And if they don't, that doesn't make the situation any worse. It's impossible to get a H1B VISA right now and they have zero chances to get one, because the quota is ridiculously low and they are all taken by the Indian sweat shops, on top of requiring 1-2 years ahead for the procedure.

My wife worked in biotech. It's very easy to find people with the appropriate undergrad and Master's degrees. It's hard to find someone with a postdoc in exactly what your company does. Unfortunately, the firm wanted to do exactly that: any advancement required going back to academia for a very precise degree/research program. There was no system of internal training or advancement at all, and as a direct result, the firm is (still) chronically understaffed, chronically overworking its employees, and frankly not at all a good place to work.

Thing is, that's your problem as a biotech firm, since the doctoral and postdoctoral job track was never meant to produce workers for industry. You really ought to just take people at an earlier stage of their career, train them for your unique needs, and advance them over the years. While doing so, you should also provide competitive salaries, reasonable hours, and job security.

Oh, and respect for basic safety. None of this "if a chemical fire starts, see if you can put it out before pulling the fire-alarm" crap I've heard about.

Lastly, if we're going to talk xenophobia, why should a firm in the Northeastern United States receive visas to hire a Serbian postdoc (educated in one of Europe's many cheap, publicly-funded university systems!) instead of hiring and training up an undergrad from Nebraska? Are Nebraskans less deserving to "immigrate" to the Northeast than Europeans?

Or are American firms just trying to leech off other countries' public education systems while not paying into making the American system comparably cheap and accessible? How come the undergrad from Nebraska has massive student-loan debt, while the European postdoc has been earning net income since grad school?

This level of open regulatory capture, gaming of the system and not looking out for the interests of the 99% strikes me as dangerous and destabilizing over the long term (but you know that already - that's why Trump won). No one wants a de-stabilized nuclear power.

I'm saying this as a citizen of a country that will certainly get affected by any of these proposed restrictions.

Except if those are not available, or do not want to work for this salary, e.g. because fringe benefits of the position (getting into US, visa being handled by somebody else, etc.) do not apply to them. Or just because they are used to much higher standards of living and demand salary that pays for well located apartment in SF, new Tesla car, etc. while some other people would be OK living with roommates and using public transportation.

> making your colleges more accessible and affordable

I'm not sure how a startup should go about making colleges more accessible and affordable. And why more accessible college necessarily would produce more highly qualified professionals exactly required by this startup and not just more people with college diploma, which means increasingly less as everybody has them now.

> The proposals merely say if you want to hire non Americans, pay more.

That is an import tariff. Tariffs are measures that harm consumers and destroy value, ask any economist.

> not looking out for the interests of the 99%

You are assuming 99% have the same interest. It is not true - it's more likely you ascribe a narrow interest to a lot of people without even trying to consider what their actual interests are.

> No one wants a de-stabilized nuclear power.

That's not even an argument. "I am right because you will lead to a nuclear war". Really?

In such a case, the point of view of your democratically elected representatives & president seems to be that either you should pay more or you should relocate your business to another country where you'll find people working for lower salary.

Your choices therefore are - become politically active & work to change the new policy, figure out ways to game the new policy (which is what led to the mess in the first place) or rethink your business model.

> That is an import tariff. Tariffs are measures that harm consumers and destroy value, ask any economist.

Unfortunately, the social harm that results from ordinary people losing their livelihood or hope of bettering their lives (as opposed to go-getting business-owners) tends to not enter the calculations of academic economists. Politicians of course have always instinctively understood this (Idle hands are a devil's workshop - to give you an idea of how old this is) and that's why they ignore the advice of economists & impose import tariffs in the real world.

If you poke into it, you'll probably find that the "lot" assumption is typically "relative to what other masters and PhDs from universities are paid". So why not hire them instead?

Mind, that might have something to do with middle America having defunded its state university systems, making skilled labor difficult to produce. We live in an economy where gluts of unskilled labor are a very bad thing for productivity, and it's about time state governments got that through their damned heads.

So if foreign students knew the couldn't even get a poorly paid job after graduating, would they go elsewhere? Would this cause a collapse of the university pyramid scheme? Would labs have to start paying real living wages for staff?

Lots less science would get done in the short term. US universities would no longer get the best and the brightest from around the world. The size of departments would plummet. But in a few years the number of graduates wouldn't totally dwarf the number of jobs available. That might not be a bad thing.

All because of some delusional billionaire who is allowed (by us) to play his real life monopoly game.

So the system is so fundamentally broken it needs massive re-engineering. I don't think the trumpists have a clue about how to do it, nor care, but their magic 8-ball approach to reform will have an impact.

(Source: I am on an O-1)

Edit: you can downvote me but it'd be nice to explain why at least. I have a hard time understanding how raising the salary requirement for capped H-1B visas will affect core science PhD students.

Regarding students (PhDs or anyone on F-1 visa), they will get straight path to permanent residence.

Also, F1 visa students provide good enough subsidies and education discounts to American students (both in-state & out-of-state tuition).

A potential solution can be something like a different type of work permits or different requirements for h1b applicants applying after they studied here, something along those lines.

Or maybe the hype is true?

The US still is an 800lbs gorilla, but it got there by making a lot of aggressive globalization, immigration, military, and investment moves. Now we have an administration that is against all those things and is run by a man who has a cult of personality behind him and can do 'not wrong' to his base. We're on a completely new path that, historically, has not ended well for modern economies. Isolationism and protectionism in a globalized economy simply does not work. Ask Hugo Chavez how well his Venezuelan experiment worked.

>We've been drifting in this direction for decades now...

This is untrue. Ignoring Bush's recession, we've been on a non-stop upwards path in almost any metric that matters: gdp, gdp per capita, military power, science publishing, space, tech innovations, environment regulations, social progress, healthcare access, etc. We are hard to beat when managed correctly. The current administration is going against all the things that have given us a leg up over the years. That is something to be concerned about. US supremacy is not a given. Its hard fought and Trump is giving up the global fight for bizarre reasons like trying to bring coal and manufacturing jobs back, neither of which is even feasible considering natural gas/renewable competition and what automation is doing to manufacturing right now.

You mean, ignoring the Second Great Depression that, outside America's richest metro areas, never ended and is still ruining lives right now?

Oh yes, other than the unbearable, unfathomable misery of tens of millions of people, we're doing great!

I'd like to believe that China will be the next nation to drag the rest of the world in the direction of progress, but they have so much standing in their way... USA might come to its senses before they get started...