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Noneya pussies have even tried the quiz question?
27%
47%
57%
67%
The answer is in the following article from the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/finance/dis...ry_id=13234953
Restricting the immigration of highly skilled workers will hurt America’s ability to innovate
JOE BIDEN, America’s new vice-president, is prone to gaffes. In 2006 it was the turn of some Americans of Asian descent to take offence at his comment about needing “a slight Indian accent” to go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts in Delaware. Mr Biden’s defence was that he was trying to compliment the immigrant group on its entrepreneurial zeal.
Many Americans are less favourably disposed towards immigrants. And rising unemployment is hardening at udes. In the hubbub over the insertion of “Buy American” provisions into President Obama’s fiscal-stimulus package, the Grassley-Sanders amendment was largely overlooked. This restricts the freedom of recipients of federal bail-out money to hire high-skilled foreign workers under the government’s H-1B visa programme. Some people were delighted at what they saw as a significant, if small, first step in cracking down on those who they fear crowd skilled American workers out of the workplace. But others contend that such restrictions could dull America’s edge in innovation, just when it is needed to help revive the economy.
Mr Obama says that part of the solution to America’s economic problems should come from its universities and research laboratories. Yet these ins utions in America are now manned disproportionately by immigrants, who made up 47% of scientists and engineers in America with PhDs, according to the 2000 census. Immigrants accounted for two-thirds of the net addition to America’s stock of such workers between 1995 and 2006. Their role in innovation may seem obvious: the more clever people there are, the more ideas are likely to flourish, especially if they can be commercialised. But although contemporary theories of growth emphasise the importance of ideas, they assign no special role to immigration. Economists have tended to think of innovation as driven by the demand for better goods, which generates a need for skilled innovators. People’s choices of career and education should respond to the labour market’s demands, encouraging more of them to become innovators if needed. But because career choices cannot be expected to adjust instantly, there might be scope for skilled immigrants to fill the gap.
Addressing these issues requires data on just how inventive immigrants are, a question that until recently was the province of educated guesswork. But William Kerr, an economist at Harvard Business School, used name-matching software to identify the ethnicity of each of the 8m scientists who had acquired an American patent since 1975. He found that the share of patents awarded to scientists born in America fell between 1975 and 2004. The share of all patents given to scientists of Chinese and Indian descent living in America more than tripled, from 4.1% in the second half of the 1970s to 13.9% in the years between 2000 and 2004. Nearly 40% of patents filed in 2005 by Intel, a silicon-chip maker, were for work done by people of Chinese or Indian origin. Some of these patents may have been awarded to American-born children of earlier migrants, but Mr Kerr reckons that most changes over time arise from fresh immigration.
What of the criticism that these workers are displacing native scientists who would have been just as inventive? To address this, Mr Kerr and William Lincoln, an economist at the University of Michigan, used data on how patents responded to periodic changes in the number of H-1B entrants. If immigrants were merely displacing natives, increases in the H-1B quota should not have led to increases in innovation. But Messrs Kerr and Lincoln found* that when the federal government increased the number of people allowed in under the programme by 10%, total patenting increased by around 2% in the short run. This was driven mainly by more patenting by immigrant scientists. But even patenting by native scientists increased slightly, rather than decreasing as proponents of crowding out would have predicted. If anything, immigrants seemed to “crowd in” native innovation, perhaps because ideas feed off each other. Economists think of knowledge, unlike physical goods, as “non-rival”: use by one person does not necessarily preclude use by others.
…and your huddled mathematicians
But does all this emigration from the developing world harm the originating countries’ capacity for innovation? A new paper** uses data on the patents cited by scientists working in India in their applications to America’s patent office. It finds that proximity does matter: Indian patent applicants refer to research by people in India much more often than they cite work by those elsewhere. In that sense, having many scientists leave India does harm innovation there. But Indian researchers also refer to scientists of Indian origin in America more than very similar work by scientists with whom they do not share ethnic ties. So a scientific diaspora gives countries of origin a leg-up in terms of access to the latest research, mitigating some of the problems of a “brain drain”. And given that the same scientist is likely to be more productive in America than in a developing country because of better facilities and more resources, immigration may help overall innovation (some of the benefits of which may flow back to firms in poorer countries).
Over time, knowledge flows between countries, and innovations in one place may benefit people elsewhere. So in the long run it may not matter where research takes place. Nonetheless, innovation benefits from clusters. Until there are Silicon Valleys all over the place, the world (and not just America) would be better off if American firms could hire the best people regardless of where they come from.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 03-09-2009 at 04:04 PM. Reason: removed bolding from the answer. find it yourself. ;)
Noneya pussies have even tried the quiz question?
I would venture to guess that a large percentage of professors and lab geeks are foreign.
In college, almost all of my professors were Middle-Eastern, Indian, or Asian.
And it sucked, because I could hardly understand them.
Poorly worded question. We're all immigrants, if you go back far enough, unless you're full-blooded North American Indian. But there ain't many people left who can say that.
Aw, you know what I mean, woman.
Wouldn't be sporting. I saw the answer in your initial post.
Immigration Official: Hi, Immigration.
Butthead: Ehhhhh... o.
Immigration Official: Yes, Imm-ig-ration.
Butthead: Ehhhhhhhhhh.....it has to be on the menu.
Immigration Official: No dumbass, I'm with Immigration.
Butthead: Really? Where?
From my experience with science-related classes, every grad student is either white, or a 1st generation asian/indian, or an asian/indian immigrant.
You're not even techinically or in any way correct either.
First of all we're not immigrnants if we're born here, immigrant has a root word in it, you might want to wiki that. You see, you kind of have to migrate here to be an immigrant.
Secondly, the only real natives here are the Mastodons and sabertooths since native indians originate from asia and migrated here just like we did.
What about Cherokee like Sam Bradford?
Pwnage.
We have to import intelligent workers because we produce such a paucity ourselves.
It's all part of the now-obvious theme of a nation in free-fall collapse.
We pretended for 40 years there would be no consequences. Now we are at the end of the road.
US sending back skilled Indians: Study
Since the US has lately been producing less and less of its own scientific/engineering talent, this may put a damper on the development of green technology that could assist in getting us out of this recession.
There was a program on NPR about this the other day, but it was talking more about the number of scientists from places like India who are having to return home because of cuts in research funding and the rising cost of living.
It's been noted at the University of Michigan that China is allowing far more scholars to come to the USA and study here - some of my friends have said that the percentages have changed drastically from just 5 years ago when they were in undergrad here.
On the one hand, yes, the US is not training enough of its youth to become serious researchers, but I think that part of this huge percentage is the quality of American universities that attract the brightest minds from all over the world. Immigrants who represent this group make our universities more prestigious and lead to better innovation. Of course I would like to see more Americans in those positions as a matter of national pride, but I don't think this particular issue is something to take as a horrible indicator for the education systems in place here. I think there are many more other indicators more troublesome than immigrants at our universities and research ins utions.
Have to agree with ES. It's a shame that this country's primary and secondary educational systems are not preparing its citizens for the opportunities available at the graduate level (or undergraduate, for that matter) in the science and engineering departments of US universities.
Yes, some of it is due to societal factors (ie occupational incomes and prestige) which make law, medicine and business schools more attractive, as well as the more mundane (science = hard and interest in science = nerd) rationale for the lack of interest among many.
As for the Chinese, we're just setting ourselves up for the future theft of American technology.
Perhaps this was their ethnic nationalism talking, but I've worked with more than one high-caste Indian who derides MIT as a "fallback school" for Indians who can't get into the prestigious universities at home.
Really? I've never heard anything like that here at Michigan, although I tend to come into contact more with eastern Asians than south Asians here. That sounds more like a caste/ethnic nationalism issue, although I could be wrong.
Also, if we're going to talk about a lack of preparing more Americans to get into these research programs, American women are under-represented far more than American men. Men still dominate the math/science fields, and more emphasis needs to be placed early on in the classroom for women to get involved (i.e. being conscious to avoid complimenting Sally on her handwriting more than getting her multiplication tables correct, because that is what tends to happen). That on its own could put many more Americans into these research opportunities than immigrants.
As a sample population, the information science PhD program at Michigan has more women than men in the immigrant category, but there are about twice as many American men than American women in the same program.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
It really sucks to have a prof who can barely speak engrish.
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