I'm always disappointed in this style of visa. These are the kinds of people we want to keep, not make their stay contingent on working at or running a startup. To me, it's really stupid that anything but a tourist/business visit visa should be non-immigrant; all long-term stay visas should provide an easy path to permanent residence (sure, assuming whatever reasonable qualifications are met).

And I wonder if these W-* visas will be similar to the H-* visas, where if you quit or are fired, you need to find similarly-qualifying employment in a disgustingly short amount of time, or you're forced to leave the country. So you end up having very little employment mobility, and many people end up feeling trapped in a job they hate, because finding a new employer that will sponsor your visa isn't always a slam dunk, and plenty of things can happen to screw it up.

All this is just band-aids on the current crap immigration system we have. But no one has the political courage (or capital?) to completely throw out the current system and write a new, sane, humane one from scratch.

Americans don’t want that. A lot of our immigration-related problems is that the executive branch created a de facto permanent immigration system (with modest Congressional acquiesce in the 1990s) out of what was sold to the public as a temporary worker visa.

Just do what the EU does and leave immigration to the states, I’d be fine having a California-only green card before naturalizing. No one wants to move to Mississippi or any of those anti immigration states anyway ;-)

If Americans don’t want easy paths to permanent residency/citizenship, it’s up to those of us who do want that to explain to them why they’re wrong.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521...

So we (as in "various elements of US society") are paying to educate people, and then are sending them back where their home countries benefit, while the US does not. It's so dumb.

There are some cool exceptions, like some programs where students educated in the US are required to go back to their home countries. The idea is to help raise the level of education in countries where the higher education system isn't well developed or funded, and I think that sort of thing is an admirable goal. But it's so bizarre that we, for example, complain about supposed Chinese academic espionage, and complain about brain drain, but simultaneously make it really hard for international students to stay in the US after they graduate.

Look at postdocs - the US gets them at a pittance, they are more productive than PhD students and rather mentor them; and unlike graduate students, are usually overwhelmingly foreign nationals.

One PhD student costs a professor about $100K - $200K per year. A third of that is stipend and the other two thirds is... well, in CS I'm not even sure. A good bit of administrative welfare AFAICT. (Universities don't pay FICA taxes for grad students and grad student healthcare premiums are actually more of a subsidy for the risk pool of the aging faculty/admins than an actually half-reasonable benefit for the grad students.)

The US graduates 2K PhDs per year, of which >60% are foreign nationals. So we spend something roughly like (2000 * .6 people) * (150000 $/person) = $180 million per year. So a couple billion per decade.

Now... we do get folks with CS BS degrees for 1-5 years at $30K/yr, which is a fucking steal, and at least a great universities they are often from the upper quarter or so of the undergrad distribution. So maybe the students are also paying in the form of subsidized labor. But we do spend hundreds of millions per year in any case.

All of that said, as long as universities are staffing mathematics departments with shit paid ad juncts it's kind of hard to argue that our country is failing to compete due to a lack of phds...

No. At least, not in CS. What sorts if things would you be referring to? Compute? Honestly you're better off with a trivial cloud grant than trying to use the slurm cluster with a dozen ancient gpus for hundreds of faculty to share. Office space? Your average dilapidated cube farm is LUXURY compared to the sardine situation grad students put up with. Robotics hardware? Doesn't really scale like that. And... those are the only three things needed for like 90% of CS research. In CS, precious few dollars other than the stipend go toward anything useful. As far as a faculty member is concerns, that money money disappears into a pit.

(What's going on is that the PhD stipend is fixed by the funding agency, and the university squeezes as much as possible away from the professor/student. Just armies upon armies of assistant deans doing not much of anything while the grad students toil away doing the only useful work in the place for rent and pizza.)

> The US graduates 2K PhDs per year, of which >60% are foreign nationals.

It looks like across fields, it's ~55k PhDs/yr, so the "Billions" quote was probably right.

So how do you want to account for labor costs? After they leave, the work got done and the workers got paid. Both sides benefit from this arrangement, though you can certainly argue (and many do) that the benefits should be split more fairly by paying the workers more.

Separately, the US would benefit from letting them stay and do more work. But that's generally the case for any immigration restriction. They get in the way of mutually beneficial private arrangements. US employers can't hire people who are willing to work for them, and the workers strongly benefit from being able to work in the US. Immigration restrictions are all about the government getting in people's way and the various justifications people make for continuing this interference.

Certainly, there has to be consequences to the countries losing minds & bodies.

Which is true. At the same time, what’s been his contribution to Bangladesh? Nothing, aside from a bit of trivia I tell people when I show them around Chicago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazlur_Rahman_Khan

If you take one of Dhaka's best and brightest and remove him/her...Dhaka gets nothing.

Like it or not, there is a darkside to USA immigration policy, just because its been normalized doesn't mean it's not there.

Not saying this pejoratively—my whole family fits this profile. But people don’t think enough about what sorts of folks we’re really bringing in and how that changes our culture.

If you mean most PhDs don’t get faculty jobs, well, then we have a glut of basketball, football, and baseball players too.

FTFY

Finally! It was utter idiocy that it wasn't already the law to staple a green card to each PhD diploma earned by a foreigner for my entire life.

Many Chinese are actually against removing the per country green card limits, because Indian applicants are so many times more that keeping the status quo actually give Chinese a better chance of success.

But that was before the cap removal is limited to PhD only. I'm not yet updated on the latest stance.

I wonder if low-quality offshore post-hole-digger diploma mills can create a loophole for this requirement.

See https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&Fil... Page 218, lines 3 to 9:

QUALIFYING INSTITUTIONS .—The term ‘‘qualifying institutions’’ means institutions of higher education that are classified as either very-high research intensive (R1) or high research intensive (R2) status universities by the Carnegie Classification of Academic Institutions.

Watch as this one gets limited and watered down. Foreign PhD graduates are a cheap labor force for STEM universities.

Are we… still giving unfair advantages to foreign nationals and companies that hire foreign nationals over Americans in 2022?

Get lost.

Why are there so many foreign PhD students? Are Americans lazy? No; we have to work. Education is high-class leisure in America. Decades ago, Americans went back to school after paying off loans and getting experience. Not so anymore; the pipeline is too full to get back into it.

This credentialism is being used to prove that Americans are unqualified to work in their own country. We should not be so impressed with PhDs. I assure you that a decade into this policy we won’t be.

Your fact-free rants aside, what people forget is how few PhDs are there, actually. Let's take materials science; even the largest schools in the discipline do not even produce 30 PhDs per year. Less than 300 materials science PhDs graduate in total in the US per year; that's it. If all materials science PhDs ever granted in the US sit together (less than 30,000), they won't even fill a football stadium.

And you can't just scale things up, equipment is multi-million dollars and it takes years to train good scientists. Nativist attitudes like yours leads to a company like ASML residing outside the US rather than inside.

You want to dig your own country/communities' graves - go for it. Just don't expect kudos for doing harakiri.

To be fair, I do understand the point of international competition for those slots, but that’s not directly aligned with the interests of the American middle class that pays the tuition and grant money to those schools.

I don’t understand your ASML anecdote. The US has far more immigrant workers than any other country on earth. Is ASML avoiding us because that’s not enough? Are Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor industries failing due to their focus on citizen training and employment rather than labor imports?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most STEM faculty are hyper-ambitious people who care about grant funding and their h-indexes above almost everything else. Secondly, the funding scenario makes it much easier to recruit US nationals over foreign citizens.

Most US universities desperately want to hire US nationals for their doctoral programs; it's cheaper and more grants are available (as many DoD/DoE projects require US nationals due to export control restrictions). During my grad school days earlier in the last decade, almost all US citizen Ph.D. students were on some national fellowship, such as NSF, NDSEG, SCGSR, or EGRC. As a result, their stipends were $10,000 more than mine. And due to these fellowships, they were free for their Ph.D. advisors, while I cost my advisor $65,000 per annum. Despite these scholarships, that we have to admit so many foreign nationals paint the correct picture of the ground reality - the US doctoral STEM pipeline is really narrow.

Part of this is plain numbers - India and China have 7-8 times more people than the US does. And in the college-going age, it's an even more significant gap, as the fertility rate in the US fell below the replacement level many decades back. The second factor is the cost of education in the US. However, it's screamed about more than it really is an issue. The largest STEM educators in the nation are all public schools, where in-state tuition rates are still reasonable, and a full degree costs less than $50,000. Still, college tuition is a significant problem, and we should solve it. At the very least, it will expand the pipeline quite a bit, but not, in my opinion, enough to fill the gap.

Honest question - have you talked with any US universities' graduate program officers rather than spouting off Steve Bannon's conspiracies.? You think your points look smart, but I know what it is - uninformed ramblings since I know the ground reality.

ASML and TSMC are running almost exclusively today by US trained people. The fact that the United States trained them and lost them - is a point of deep concern. And people like you will prolong this crisis through misguided xenophobia rather than contributing to a meaningful solution.

There were 55000 phds awarded in 2020, up from 40000 in 2000.

The unfair advantages (and scams and frauds that go hand in hand as well) are extensively documented and well known, which is why our big tech companies are so high on foreign nationals in the first place, and why their countries of origin love it as well.

That being said this bill is an excellent step towards bringing jobs and manufacturing back to where they belong: the USA.