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My problem with the short term solution is that it interferes with the market correction that could bring more Americans back into engineering. If engineering
by geebee 17y ago
My problem with the short term solution is that it interferes with the market correction that could bring more Americans back into engineering.
If engineering is more difficult and pays less, than you'd expect a shortage. Markets will correct this shortage naturally, since bidding wars will emerge for the smaller number of qualified engineers, wages will rise, and people who would otherwise do law or medicine would look at engineering with more interest. Unfortunately, if you allow industry-specific immigration (or worse, guest worker) programs, this market correction will never occur. This is a big part of why many people who are not opposed to immigration in general take a very dim view of the H1B (keep in mind that Milton Friedman (not exactly a guy who advocates "reducing immigration for the express purpose of not unduly expanding the labor pool" was a critic of the H1B program for this very reason). It's not that it expands the labor pool, it's that it does it in a very uneven way. You're essentially saying "we'll let you in here to do engineering, but not to do, say, law." This amounts to a government program designed to discourage Americans from studying engineering and get them into law school instead.
While most fields aren't nearly as closed off to "new Americans who may look a little different and have a funny last name" as law is, there mere absence of a widespread visa program can have a similar effect. So you'd also expect this program to encourage Americans who might otherwise have studied engineering to become real estate agents, mortgage brokers, nurses, and physical therapists.
I don't like to hear people say "dey took our jawbs", but I think it's very legitimate to ask "why did the government set up a system where engineering (and a few other) jobs were the only ones they were allowed to take?"
Especially when independent, objective research like the RAND study suggests that engineering isn't experiencing any kind of labor shortage.
BTW, there is one final factor here, which may explain what is going on. Many jobs are lucrative to the person doing them without producing much wealth. Engineering is generally the opposite - produces great amounts of wealth, but not always lucrative for the practitioner. To over simplify, a tax lawyer who saves a client a million doesn't produce a million in wealth, but he'll be paid by his client as if he had. An engineer generally does produce this wealth. So society, in general, has more interest in producing engineers than individuals have in becoming engineers. So I suppose the US has decided to resolve this by seeing if we can lure away someone else's engineers. That way, we can be lawyers, real estate agents, and so forth, and still have someone producing the wealth that the rest of us get to divvy up. As long as you ban those new people from taking anything other than an engineering job, and you don't mind watching Americans abandon the field in large numbers, should be fine, right?
Well, wait until we can't get engineers from overseas, and need to suddenly revive a profession that we essentially destroyed through policy. I actually think this could end very badly, which is often the case with the unintended consequences that occur when you regulate markets unevenly. I think that in the long run, these programs could create a severe shortage that will be very damaging.
- lsc 17y agoI think you raise interesting points; there is, however, historical precedence, I think, for encouraging immigration in certain fields; I understand that foreign doctors have been given immigration preference for some time.
- geebee 17y agoThere is some historical precedence. However, I'm not sure if we have any precedent for what is happening in engineering. Medical, MBA, and even law schools do admit international students, of course, and engineering graduate programs should too. Our schools would be much weaker if we limited ourselves to US born students, and the experience of all students would be poorer for it. But the percentage of US born students has dropped so severely in graduate engineering programs that I think we're in uncharted and dangerous waters here. When I was a grad student in engineering at Berkeley (about a decade ago now), I become accustomed to being the only person who grew up in the US in class, study groups, and so forth. For the reasons I described above, I think this is a dangerous situation for the US. In fact, I actually think that our graduate engineering schools (this is based on my limited experience at Berkeley) are starting to assume a European or Asian type of undergraduate preparation, where students tend to specialize earlier, than an American one, where we do more general education and specialize later. While I actually think that Americans from top undergraduate colleges are very well educated, they probably aren't at the same point in their particular branch of study as international students who have studied their subjects more exclusively as undergraduates, so we may soon be at a point where the structure of US graduate education in engineering is less accessible to people who have come up through our own education system. By analogy, supposed you majored in English and went to law school, having never taken a law class. That's how it works in the US. Now imagine if 95% of your classmates spent the last 4 years at Oxford studying common law, including substantial amounts of study of the US legal system. Well, you'd struggle no matter how wonderful an undergrad student you'd been. I think this structural shift is well underway in US based graduate engineering programs. Interestingly, US students do enroll in undergraduate engineering programs, because those degrees pay. They just tend to avoid graduate programs in favor of law, business, and medicine - and if you look at the numbers, it's hard to conclude that this is not a highly rational decision.