The STEM concept seems odd. You have the computer programming and engineering people, for whom apparently there is a demand and who get paid huge salaries, and then you have the other people, for whom there is not any great demand.
STEM is old and busted. STEAM is the new hotness.
I was discussing this around the lab. It's sort of confusing, because 1. I do not think the people in my lab are who they are concerned about, but nonetheless 2. some of them would be in, but 3. only the ones who got degrees here, not the ones who got degrees elsewhere and are doing postdocs here, or whatever. It seems pretty random. On the other hand, it turns out there already is a path to citizenship for people with STEM-ish PhDs, it just involves proving your worthwhileness by publishing papers and having 7 cosponsors or something.
2: so essentially everything except the humanities? That's sort of silly. Why not included the humanities and rock 'n roll and have HAMSTER?
2 - Sure, because if it weren't hot it would just be WATER.
I thought the idea was to coax undocumented high school students to pursue STEM fields in college, so that they might be allowed to stay. In other words, that the point was "path to citizenship for undocumented kids" and not "let's keep the foreign-born-and-raised talent that we just educated".
2, 4: as long as B-school continues not to count, I'm fine with whatever.
Have I mentioned how fond I am of QUILTBAG as an alternative to LGBTQ? I've lost track of what the vowels mean without looking it up (Asexual? Intersexed? Uninterested?), but the fact that someone found a pronounceable word there makes me really happy.
Pacing! Jeez, a person can hardly keep up around here.
6: I get the sense that it is the latter.
I thought the idea was to coax undocumented high school students to pursue STEM fields in college, so that they might be allowed to stay.
I do like this over the previous plan, which was to coax undocumented high school students to fight our wars.
Yeah, I felt like the paragraph I quoted supported the latter interpretation, too. But the Yahoo News! article that I was too embarrassed to quote made it sound like the former.
13: Join the BEASTM program! Be a BEASTMaster!
Here's that article.
Reforming the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain advanced degrees in science, math, technology or engineering from an American university.
I was thinking that undergraduate degrees swamp graduate degrees, and so this must be trying to provide an incentive for people to pursue undergrad degrees in STEM fields.
Undergraduate degrees swamp graduate degrees among "advanced degrees"?
I was thinking bachelor's degrees were advanced. I suppose they aren't.
1- I read a few blogs with disgruntled pharma industry people and they respond to proposals like this about how you'd expect middle aged white men to react.
3- I know that program and it's hilarious what you have to have from cosponsors- anything less than fawning superlatives are considered unacceptable and are likely to be rejected by the immigration review.
IA most def NAImmigration L but I think the idea is that if you get a STEM degree from a major US institution, you pretty much automatically get a green card, which (remember, IAMDNAIL) is very much not the case right now.
"Amnesty" or guaranteed amnesty for people already in the country would be something different. But perhaps there's a STEM component there, too.
I assume that the limitation to STEM and not HAMSTER is to prevent Miss Porter's Academy from opening up the "Advanced Studies In Etiquette for Upper Middle Class Latin Americans" M.A. program. Nonetheless, I'd expect it to be a huge enormous boon to STEM schools in the US, especially lower-ranking ones.
A bachelor's degree STEM amnesty incentive would be a better discussion topic. They should have proposed that.
19.2: I only just learned about it from somebody who successfully used it (along with her husband) to get a green card but to be honest they pretty much deserve the fawning superlatives they presumably got from various highly influential faculty.
Which means people who deserve them and people who get them just to pass the program can't be distinguished. One of the biggest problems in higher ed today is fawning superlative inflation.
I think that most of the "path to citizenship" proposals already provide for legal status for most people who could be "amnestied" by a STEM degree (that is, American residents who immigrated illegally as children).
I didn't realize that. I thought they just got to loll in no-man's-land, where they wouldn't be prosecuted as long as they register with the nice government and assume no Republican ever holds the presidency again.
One of the biggest problems in higher ed today is fawning superlative inflation.
This is, by far, the most commandingly masterful sentence on the topic that I have ever read in my decades of careful, attentive reading. I would go further and say that it is the most profoundly well-considered sentence I have ever seen, on any topic, anywhere.
Meanwhile anybody else waiting on the resolution of the sequester to see if they get funded?
STEM graduate students are all well and good, but I'd like to see a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants skilled in such areas as lettuce-picking and house-painting.
29: I am. The hella fast camera I mentioned previously is funded through an SBIR Phase I grant, and there's no guarantee it will not be axed if funding to DOE gets hit. It's certainly not a high priority for the administration.
I know a few postdocs that have had their funding decisions postponed, and I have a feeling a grant I'm on is in limbo (they haven't mentioned anything, but it's a suspicion).
1 - I read a few blogs with disgruntled pharma industry people and they respond to proposals like this about how you'd expect middle aged white men to react.
They and Ned are right. People running around bemoaning our shortage of scientists are liars and/or fucking idiots. What they want is cheap skilled labor, plain and simple. See this Adam Davidson article for more delightful examples of this. A key graf.
Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister's pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a "union-type job." Isbister, after all, doesn't abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald's can earn around $14 an hour.
26 -- IAMDNAIL, but I think that's the current system, part of a regulatory fix offered by Obama. I was talking about the various new proposals for reform, most of which offer some kind of definite "Path to Citizenship" (the details matter a lot here!) for people whose parents illegally immigrated when they were children.
Everyone's favorite Tea Party prankster and glitterbomber deprecates the new "reform" proposal pretty strongly. He notes that it contains the following:
"To fulfill the basic governmental function of securing our borders, we will continue the increased efforts of the Border Patrol by providing them with the latest technology, infrastructure, and personnel needed to prevent, detect, and apprehend EVERY unauthorized entrant.Additionally, our legislation will increase the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment, improve radio interoperability and increase the number of agents at and between ports of entry. The purpose is to substantially lower the number of successful illegal border crossings while continuing to facilitate commerce."
"We will demonstrate our commitment to securing our borders and combating visa overstays by requiring our proposed enforcement measures be complete before any immigrant on probationary status can earn a green card
Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants, pass an additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work in the United States, and current employment, among other requirements, in order to earn the opportunity to apply for lawful permanent residency. Those individuals who successfully complete these requirements can eventually earn a green card."
Tl;dr: A few immigrant workers get to be 3rd-class citizens, the rest of them are screwed even worse.
16: The reference to "reforming the legal immigration system" makes it sound like the initiative would be aimed at people on student visas or otherwise already in the US legally.
Also, that's an AP article so no need to be embarrassed by Yahoo News.
Everyone's favorite Tea Party prankster and glitterbomber
I have no fucking idea to whom this would refer. RuPaul?
33- I'm not sure about the policy implications- immigration, especially at the higher education level, tends to not be zero sum. But the responses are a hilariously un-self-aware racist mix of, "Those Asian automatons don't know how to do creative science," and, "They're all going to steal our jobs."
Maybe we can hire newly amnestied immigrants to patrol the borders, so they can participate in the time-honored American tradition of coming to this county and then working to pull up the ladder behind you.
37 - George Robert Twelves Hewes, I think. A face that screams "glitterbomb"!
I know a few postdocs that have had their funding decisions postponed, and I have a feeling a grant I'm on is in limbo (they haven't mentioned anything, but it's a suspicion).
As far as I can tell every grant decision that was supposed to be made since about April 2012 is in limbo. People in my department have gotten funding to hire postdocs and now would rather let that money disappear than actually hire one because they don't think they can afford to buy the materials required for the postdocs to actually do anything.
The congressional Republican Delay And Chaos plan probably works better for theorists and computer modely people.
The woodworker? He makes a nice chair.
STEM graduate students are all well and good, but I'd like to see a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants skilled in such areas as lettuce-picking and house-painting.
Apparently that is (maybe) part of the bill. I was surprised and pleased to see this.
The more unexpected exemption is agricultural workers. "Individuals who have been working without legal status in the United States agricultural industry have been performing very important and difficult work to maintain America's food supply while earning subsistence wages. Due to the utmost importance in our nation maintaining the safety of its food supply, agricultural workers who commit to the long term stability of our nation's agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population."
Wow, that a nice inclusion... I'm sure the House will have a great time chewing that one up and spitting it out.
Together with shouts of SHAMNESTY!!!! BLAARGGGG!!!
Science, humanities, arts, math, new math, engineering, sophistry, technology, and, um, yodeling?
Bowling, Lively arts, Archery, Angling, Roller disco, German, Golfing, Goal-setting and Goat-herding.
I am certain that the agricultural worker exemption was put in by Big Agra. Doesn't make it a bad idea, though.
It's largely a program designed for attracting immigrants from the Alps.
50 to 49? I would have guessed Hindustan.
Actually, that passage just says that ag workers will be "treated differently," not that they will get a path to citizenship. This may just be a means up slipping an "indentured labor" exception into the bill.
People seem to think it's an expansion of the guest worker program.
Bowling, Lively ashtrays, Archery, Angling, Roost discretion, German, Golfing, Goblin-shackle and Goddess-herding.
I hear Dubai has a nice "guest worker" program.
Yeah, it could easily just be a guest worker program extension.
There's no fucking way any of this will pass, of course. Maybe a bigger fence and more guest workers?
That line about 'commit to the long term stability' is weird, given that the industry's economic stability is often dependent on labor's precariousness. I'm with Spike in 52.
I can only assume neoliberals support indentured servitude as welfare enhancing.
The STEM thing might well pass, because it'd be supported by big business and the universities [for whom: gold mine!] would lobby hard for it, and the people who are freaked out about scary brown people may have a harder time being freaked out, at least explicitly, about scary brown people with Masters Degrees in Chemical Engineering.
I think the STEM thing, on its own, would actually be quite likely to pass, because rich people want it. So I'm hoping that can it be used as leverage to also provide a better shot at citizenship for least of our brothers.
More likely, it will be used as leverage to create new ways of exploiting people.
At some point a tea party representative will point out how well educated the Sept. 11 hijackers were.
I think spike's pessimism is warranted but I'm going to chose to be optimistic for at least a day (after all, it probably won't pass anyway so why not believe the best of poor doomed idea).
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Catching up on wonkblog there are some interesting stories today.
This is depressing, but makes me feel good about my new year's prediction.
This includes the interesting observation, "Another culprit you identify was the wonk/think tank community, which you say is captured by a bias both towards proposing policies that might pass and towards policies that are new and interesting and clever. There's a huge incentive in the policy community to be within the bounds of the possible, which makes them something of a force multiplier for bad ideas when the possible has been narrowed too far."
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62: Didn't they have more STEMish backgrounds too?
Isn't there some way to make it Biology Reading Engineering Arithmetic Science and Technology so kids will give a damn about it?
3 On the other hand, it turns out there already is a path to citizenship for people with STEM-ish PhDs, it just involves proving your worthwhileness by publishing papers and having 7 cosponsors or something.
Really? Is it insanely difficult to get or something? It seems like everyone I know is constantly going through headaches to get visas renewed, and most immigrant physicists I know don't get green cards until they've been here for well over a decade.
The visa system kind of sucks. From a largely selfish perspective, it would be nice if my girlfriend could leave the US without worrying that she won't be let back in.
Huh, I just saw this thread. OK, long serial comments coming. You have been warned.
The most important thing to understand about the various immigration bills is that they are trying to deal with three very different issues:
1) what to do with 11 million undocumented people
2) what to do with millions of people who are legally here, but in quasi-limbo (more on this below) and have no reasonable or easy path to citizenship
3) how to adjust various levers and pulleys on our immigration system to get more of what we want (whatever that is) and less of what we don't
ALL of the proposed solutions have mondo-level consequences, many of which (I am looking at you Ted Kennedy circa 1965) are not being anticipated or at least not publicly predicted by the people advocating them
Issue #1 is probably the best-known. There are 11 million people in this country who don't have immigration status. About 40% of them overstayed a visa or otherwise came here legally and then fell out of status. The remaining 60% came without authorization. Either way, they have very few if any options under the current system (although the overstays have more).
Advocates want to give these people a path to citizenship. There are obvious humanitarian reasons to do this, as well as some reasonably persuasive economic and social arguments to do so. (However, do NOT believe the people who say these are just going to be a bunch of Democratic voters. That is a load of horse manure.)
Opponents say that giving any kind of a path to citizenship will create a mammoth incentive for future immigrants to just arrive with no papers, and trust that if they survive under the radar screen for long enough, there will be another amnesty-even-if-we-don't-call-it-that.
66: yes. See all the "why are terrorists engineers" things. Crooked Timber had a doozy back in the day, I think.
You don't have to sound that surprised.
68: I guess so? The woman I talked to is still a postdoc, but maybe she's just extra super connected?
Issue #2 is poorly understood, except by the people who are directly affected. The short version is that the US immigration system isn't a single long line of potential immigrants -- it's many different lines, each with different rules.
People who come here on a high-skilled worker visa (typically H1B) *can* technically apply for a green card under certain circumstances. However, there are per-country quotas on green cards (otherwise large countries like India and China might use up ALL of them for the foreseeable future).
So each year, there are many thousands and tens of thousands MORE people who are in valid H1B status* and want to get green cards, than can get green cards.
One proposed solution to this problem is to open up more green-card slots. A different solution would be to take the the slots away from one part of the immigration system and give them to another, leaving the total number of slots unchanged.
*And others; I'm just using this as an example.
Fixing this problem would certainly help tens of thousands of people, maybe a million, nationwide. It might also help smaller employers who want to be able to hire someone but don't have the cash to keep paying for immigration legal advice.
It actually wouldn't do that much for employers (shock, horror!) because -- guess what? -- employers actually kind of love having workers who are desperately depending on them to stay in valid status.*
*Technically you can change jobs while on an H1B but not without a lot of angst and some serious risk.
Anyway, yes, 72, it was revealed in the archives.
Issue #3 is where Heebie's post (you remember heebie? There's a post by her) comes in. There are all sorts of proposals floating around for this one, but I'll focus on the STEM green cards because that's high-profile.
The STEM thing was famously publicized by Mayor Bloomberg, who proclaimed that we should "staple a green card to every diploma" of graduating foreign students -- or maybe just the ones with STEM degrees.
These are NOT undocumented kids (aka Dreamers). They are generally fairly privileged (by the standards of their home countries) kids who came to the US on an F1 or J1 student visa, graduated from college, and for various reasons (mostly a cap on the numbers) could not get an American employer to sponsor them for a H1B work visa.
The people who advocate changing our immigration laws to grant them green cards see several benefits to keeping these international students in the US:
- We paid to educate them (via our nonprofit colleges), we should reap the benefits
- They want to stay; why are we sending them away?
- They are the "best of the best"
- They have skills that US-born students lack (this is more or less baloney on a population level, very true in individual cases)
People who oppose this change typically focus on:
- We are facilitating brain drain of developing countries
- The J1 visa in particular includes a promise that the person will go back and serve two years in the country that sponsored them -- why would we undercut this?
To 68: It's not clear to me from Sifu's description exactly what this case involves, but it sounds like the person was getting an O visa or H1B (putting them on a path to a green card, maybe) rather than a green card itself.
O visas especially require extraordinary testimonials, since like everything else in US immigration (IANAL!), the working definition is a highly subjective term of art.
ANYWAY, to wrap up my extremely verbose series of comments:
There is no reason to include the STEM provision in an omnibus immigration bill, except that people who want to fix the undocumented problem believe that you have to do everything at once, not piecemeal. (Because piecemeal means you peel off all the special interest groups, and then the less-photogenic issues at the end get abandoned.)
For a number of years, Arlen Specter refused to bring he DREAM Act to a vote in the Judiciary Committee for exactly this (stated, anyway) reason. And so here we are, with a bunch of teens and 20-somethings arguably having gotten the issue on the national radar screen in a way that nobody else could.
I heard that only people who publish first-author papers in Nature or something have a shot at the visa Sifu is talking about.
At least that's the reputation that visa has and no one I actually know has bothered applying for it for that reason.
Thank you for sounding surprised, Keir.
You don't have to sound that surprised.
Is she an airplane?
If she is an airplane that would certainly explain some things.
While admittedly leaving many more things in need of explanation.
That's why they pay me the big bucks.
it would be nice if my girlfriend could leave the US without worrying that she won't be let back in
There's an obvious solution to that. Are we invited to the wedding?
First the foreigners come and take the jobs, then the physicists.
If STEM jobs paid enough (for the effort extended to get the degree) American students would flock to them, and there would be no need to attract immigrants to fill the slots in graduate school, or jobs in high-tech companies. We really need to attract more foreign CEOs, CFOs and corporate lawyers, as these typically get paid so much more than the engineers.
There isn't a shortage of STEM graduates, never was (during my life time); it is just that too many of them recognize -after being underpaid researchers for so long, or being laid-off as research is a luxury in a company focused on the next quarterly statement - that they need to do something else to support their families.--
There is a 'exceptional ability' (or similarly-named) provision to get a green card (requiring indeed exceptional talent, publications, international acclaim); for most STEM graduates it is the 'labor certificate' where an employer has to show that there is no US worker displaced if this immigrant is hired. (Ads for these often show certain details on job, like: working hours 9-5, send your resume by snail mail [not e-mail], required education Ph.D. or 3 years in job, other requirements disqualifying anyone who did not work at exactly this job [on H1B] for the last 3 years. if you are looking for a job, you know that sending your resume there is a waste of paper and postage).