Further to our 6 April entry ‘Debating the possible decline of the USA’s attractiveness to foreign students and highly skilled foreign professionals‘, the New York Times sponsored a related debate (‘Do We Need Foreign Technology Workers?‘) on 8 April. The six contributors (and the titles of their statements) are:
- Vivek Wadhwa, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University (‘Our Real Problem Is the Brain Drain’)
- Norman Matloff, computer science professor, U.C. Davis (‘Suppressing Wages With Younger Workers’)
- Guillermina Jasso, sociology professor, N.Y.U. (‘A Work Force in Motion’)
- Ron Hira, public policy professor, Rochester Institute of Technology (‘Training Your Own Replacement’)
- Mark Heesen, National Venture Capital Association (‘Why Reject Entrepreneurial Spirit?’)
- John Miano, lawyer and computer programmer (‘Low Salaries, Low Skill’)
The debate has generated nearly 400 comments within day 1, and many (well some…) are worth reading to acquire a sense of the complexity of the issue and the often divergent viewpoints that exist. Recall that the outcome of such debates have huge implications for graduate education in US universities, as well as the associated processes of ‘brain circulation’, ‘brain drain’, ‘brain gain’, etc.
I should add that the New York Times has a truly excellent group of cartographers on staff (I am biased here…some have UW-Madison ties). The team has developed an associated interactive map (‘Immigration and Jobs: Where U.S. Workers Come From‘), and one of the many maps they produced is pasted in below.
Kris Olds
GlobalHigherEd 