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Walter Watts
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Laughing and Crying
« on: 2007-05-30 09:14:09 » |
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May 23, 2007
Laughing and Crying
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.
I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America's great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read their names and each was handed their doctorate -- in biotechnology, computing, physics and engineering -- by the school's president, Shirley Ann Jackson.
The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming -- ''Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang'' -- I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until ''Paul Shane Morrow'' saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls ''the quiet crisis'' in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.
Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world's best minds. My complaint -- why I also wanted to cry -- was that there wasn't someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can't educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we'd better make sure we can import someone else's, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.
It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders -- as wide as possible -- to attract and keep the world's first-round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent. I'm serious. I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country -- in any subject -- should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.
Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas available to companies that want to bring in skilled foreign workers and the number of employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because we're not training enough engineers, but they will, over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that -- and where innovation happens matters. It's still where the best jobs will be located.
Folks, we can't keep being stupid about these things. You can't have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to start companies -- without it eventually impacting our standard of living -- especially when we're also slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.
My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an issue in the presidential campaign by creating a movement to demand that candidates focus on our digital deficits and divides. (See: http://www.techpresident.com.) Mr. Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in 2005 on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere, notes that ''only half of America has broadband access to the Internet.'' We need to go from ''No Child Left Behind,'' he says, to ''Every Child Connected.''
Here's the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country -- oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming book ''The First Campaign,'' which deals with this theme. So right now, it's mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can do without Washington being focused and leading.
Which is why we've got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end in the quickest, least bad way possible -- otherwise we are going to lose Iraq and America. It's coming down to that choice.
* Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Walter Watts
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Hermit
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Re:Laughing and Crying
« Reply #1 on: 2007-05-30 15:02:03 » |
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We "love life" (meaning "they don't) and so have different priorities. Nuclear Weapons and aircraft carriers before education (or one of the reasons economic apartheid in the US is as bad as it is), and killing Iraqis before providing medical services (which is why more and more of America's aging uninsured are considering suicide a normal part of a treatment plan).
The aforegoing may take us some of the way towards explaining why China and India both have more graduates on a per capita basis, and that each graduates more scientists and engineers per year than does the USA (although the US does graduate more lawyers per year than both together, and we all know how lawyers improve economic productivity and competitiveness. Right?).
But why does Friedman imagine that the US should benefit from the huge investment made in these children and their undergraduate degrees when the US has a 50 year history of cutting the real value of federal and state assistance to students? Particularly under the latest maladministration.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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