Maureen Groppe has an article about how the pending federal immigration bill would affect students in advanced degree programs. Current rules apparently let students study here and then pushes them out of the United States. So, on that end, the argument is that you are creating value and then throwing it out of the country to the detriment of the U.S. The proposed rules would make it easier for you to stay.
But, then you get into the murky business of guest worker programs and lowering the wages of Americans with these sorts of skills. The companies will tell you that there is insufficient supply. The workers will respond that the price needs to rise to attract the available talent.
All of this sounds fairly familiar; echoing the myth of the skills gap we see even in the non-immigration context. But, you also have a variation of the nativist sentiment in this country that really doesn’t care for immigration to start with. The talking points generally center on “illegal” immigration but proponents of these talking points are never particularly open to the idea of expanding legal immigration, thereby reducing the amount of illegality. (Always an option with these malum prohibitum crimes.) In this context, however, the nativist sentiments are muted a bit due to the high end skills of the potential immigrants in question. It’s hard to drum up specters of welfare moochers when you’re talking about people with Ph.Ds in astrophysics.
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