I have a (related) counterpoint. The real problem is that there just aren't that many good US-educated engineers. This boils down to the US's weird college system, where either parents have to save up for their children's tuitions, or the people have to be lucky to get a scholarship.
The US is not a land of equal opportunity when it comes to education, which is costing a lot of potential talent to be lost. There's some improvement in 'free' online courses, but that's still only a patch next to a formal education.
If the US would invest more in its people and their educations, they wouldn't need as much foreign talent.
(spreading work out over the country instead of focusing it in SF would also help)
These articles almost always end with two points. 1) The USA needs to make it very easy for foreign engineerings and scientists to immigrate, and 2) the USA needs to improve science and engineering education.
These articles seem to assume that if you open your doors, foreign engineers will come, and that if you improve your educational system, your own students will become engineers. Both are probably false in the long run.
First, there actually aren't all that many talented engineers overseas. A recent study at Duke completely debunked the notion that China and India are producing massive numbers of talented engineers. This isn't to knock IIT grads, of course - they are a very talented bunch. But 300,000 grads at this level every year? Not even close.
Second, improving the US education system in math and science isn't going to create more engineers if law, medicine, and finance remain more attractive. I recently read an article about how Japan is starting to experience engineering shortages. It was the first honest article I'd read in a while: unlike the economist article, this one pointed out that engineering is really, really hard, and doesn't pay as well as other like finance, medicine and law. In other words, there are other paths that are easier, more lucrative, and more stable than engineering.
Another problem, of course, is that if foreign engineers enter the US in large numbers while law jobs remain off limits to foreigners, that creates an incentive for US students to avoid engineering and go into law. Even if you don't create special protections for Americans like law and medicine do, you'd still expect people to steer clear of a field targeted for employment-related immigration.
In many ways, the US has created the perfect set of conditions to deter Americans from entering the field.
I think you misunderstood what I said about degrees. I wasn't comparing degrees from different countries, I was only comparing degrees acquired in the U.S. by U.S. citizens.
Your original point was that there shouldn't be a shortage of talent in the U.S.: that companies should be able to find enough U.S. workers for things like engineering jobs. And I'm saying that there may not actually be enough local talent; it depends on how many U.S. citizens choose the "hard" degree programs that companies want.
There's lots of money to be made by U.S. citizens in certain sectors such as finance. It's conceivable that some U.S. students would opt for an "easier" degree if that still leads to a high-paying job; they may see no point in the extra work of a "hard" program like science or engineering.
Clearly not all U.S. citizens do that, and those that do choose engineering are just as employable, or more so, than immigrant engineers; I never said they weren't.
The problem is that the US, and California in particular, has no shortage of brilliant engineers from all over the world willing to come and work there and to do research.
As such, there is no incentive to make the best of home-grown talent. There is no skin in the game.
To be fair, if engineers from other countries can earn more money in America, that's an indication that their skills are better put to use here than elsewhere.
Stop tying engineering to universities and the problem will be solved. People want careers, they want to solve complex problems, and we have more tooling and knowledge than ever to do so. The problem is U S. Education is squeezing it dry.
In the U.K. you can go for engineering in many fields without it breaking the bank or having to compete for the top 0.1% of schools.
If india, Taiwan, and china can do better than the U.S. - there's a big problem. Rebuild the system.
The USA definitely needs to make it easier for sharp foreign-born people to immigrate and work here. The public school system needs to be overhauled to provide better science and engineering education. However, these have been valid arguments for years - even before the 9/11 attacks and the rise of R&D in China and India.
I always wonder when the Economist leaves out basic economics. The locations in the USA where engineering, R&D and startup innovation are concentrated are also the most expensive places to live.
25 years ago, a research scientist or engineer could make $60K and buy a house in Livermore for $120K. Now, that same house is $1.2M but the salary for a research scientist is still $60K. The immigrant researchers and engineers who originally populated silicon valley now encourage their children to be doctors, lawyers, or increasingly to go into finance (Economics is now #1 major for Smart People).
This can be fixed one of two ways: pay engineers and researchers more, or build R&D centers in less expensive areas. Corporations are choosing the second option. Unfortunately (for americans), the less expensive areas they are moving R&D are located overseas.
I agree with you in the short term. But I think that the long term absence of employable Americans may be caused, in part, by the programs that make it easy to hire foreign nationals instead of Americans in engineering and science.
There are a lot of really smart Americans working in law, finance, medicine, and so forth. Do you think these folks are too dumb to work in software? Or are they just rationally responding to a market glut, driven in part by the presence of the H1B program?
I think our policy has driven young Americans out of engineering. To just consider the few Americans who did get these degrees is shortsighted. You have to consider the eighth graders, high school students, and first year college students who have been deterred from entering the field. Because we controlled the wages of engineers with a visa program, but not finance or legal professionals, we deterred our own from going into these fields (creating a more severe shortage, necessitating more visas, creating an even worse shortage, until we had finally reached the point where Americans were no longer even remotely interested in this field).
Basically, America "foreignized" engineering to the point where we no longer have a home grown, self sustaining engineering profession. This has left us extremely vulnerable - even if we do offer the visas, there's no guarantee we can staff these jobs in the US anymore.
By the way, I do think that a robust home-grown engineering field would be enhanced by the presence of many foreign born practitioners. But I think we pushed it to the point where actively undermined the careers of young Americans in engineering, and the next wave of students voted with their feet.
Yes, allow in talented engineers. No, don't leave the level so high that Americans are deterred. A bit of a shortage that causes wage growth and stimulates interest would be a good thing.
People keep parroting this urban myth, but I just don't see it. The best engineers I've worked with (by far) have been US-educated. Yes, mostly from the upper strata of academia (Stanford/Berkeley/UCLA/MIT/Caltech/etc.) but I'd say that the "average" US developer is significantly more capable than the average off-shore developer.
I mean, the great majority of the main technological advances of the past 20 years have generated by American companies (and more often than not by US-educated entrepreneurs).
Anti-intellectualism might indeed be a problem (maybe?) but to say that tech has been adversely affected is, imo, untrue.
Then why doesn't the US produce more top quality engineers? It isn't as though the US lacks the population or resources to solve this problem domestically. My thinking is that Americans simply don't want it that badly.
I am going by the claims in the article, which are very specific about how China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers skilled in this particular discipline than the US. Perhaps the US education system is capable of it, if it tried. (Actually, almost certainly the US is capable of it, there's nothing about geography or ethnicity or law to prevent it.) But the US does not, nonetheless.
It seems a lot of people are discussing something which is related to immigration but not related to the topic of the article.
Not to mention a lot of very skilled European engineers move to US (sometimes Canada). It's easy to brag about talent when being on the receiving side of the brain drain.
One of his arguments in my opinion is invalid. He tries to suggest that if USA would simply invest in education, especially in middle America, then USA would produce enough engineers to not have to import engineers from abroad.
However, my view is that not everyone, regardless of education, can be good software engineer. Almost all software engineers I know used to be very top at mathematics and science since the very first year of primary school. They didn't receive any superior education, but researched and learned things by themselves, very often against a lot of things that stood in their way, like no access to internet or much more obligations (like helping family on the farm) than kids in America.
Nowadays, when it is getting much easier to learn anything being anywhere in the world, just being born or educated in the USA loses it's value.
Remember, that USA is just about 5% of world population.
I don't doubt that the US can produce good schools and good engineers. Like I said what happened during world war two was unprecedented.
But good engineers from good schools won't stay and become great at their work unless they have big infrastructure projects to work on. Also money and prestige. Their colleagues from Japan, France, Germany and Spain have huge infrastructure projects to work on.
What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?
First, you simply asserted -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that the US lacks sufficient stem professionals.
Two points:
1 - plenty of stem surveys (lumping all of stem together, as you did) show plenty of available candidates as calculated by the percentage of domestic stem graduates working in stem post graduation. see, eg,
2 - if you wish to limit the discussion to sf/valley type jobs, a honest claim is there aren't sufficient already trained engineers who wish to live in sf/valley at the prices employers wish to offer who already have the desired skills. There are lots of ways to address it: pay enough so that living here isn't a financial disaster (compare housing prices in sf/nyc (much cheaper than sf!), seattle, chicago, boston, etc), solve transport problems making san jose and sf essentially separate cities, figure out remote employees, hire women (and even retain them!), train engineers, etc.
2b - even a smidge of economics will tell you it's very hard for an actual shortage to exist; there's a clear lack of evidence of wage increases (over cost of living increases) that would accompany an actual tightening of the labor market
You realize that the majority of Engineering Phds in the US are foreign born ? - the US heavily relies on being able to attract international talent to maintain its advantage.
You are both making different points, because I agree with both of you. Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with have been foreign born, and I’ve also seen disasters happen due to outsourcing to foreign talent. These are two vastly different groups we are talking about. The best foreign engineers almost always end up working for well paying product companies. The other end of the spectrum, foreign or US, often end up at contracting companies that compete on price.
Expect to see more of this. Other nations will innovate and keep talent around while Bay Area engineers are stuck in traffic or moving away because of bad schools and insane housing costs.
The US is not a land of equal opportunity when it comes to education, which is costing a lot of potential talent to be lost. There's some improvement in 'free' online courses, but that's still only a patch next to a formal education.
If the US would invest more in its people and their educations, they wouldn't need as much foreign talent.
(spreading work out over the country instead of focusing it in SF would also help)
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