4 ms·

What's stopping all these companies from growing the talent themselves? The rhetoric always makes it sound like the sky is falling and if they don't get their s

What's stopping all these companies from growing the talent themselves? The rhetoric always makes it sound like the sky is falling and if they don't get their super smart foreign staff NOW, the business will crash. The problem is that this sort of story plays out year after year with one tech group or another having a "critical shortage." You'd think if this were an immediate problem then these companies that were unable to source and retain talent would have died off by now. Surprisingly they're still here. And the types of talent that the likes of Google or Facebook would be interested in -- genuine genius and extra-ordinary ability-- already have visa programs: O-1 and EB-1. It's just that H-1B visas are relatively easier to get. So what makes getting immigrants a better proposition than growing the talent yourself? Everyone wants the talent, but nobody wants to cultivate it.

krschultz 14y ago
Forget that angle for a second. When I sitting in my graduate engineer classes, 50%+ of the students were foreign. Most of them were working with professors on projects supported by the federal government via various grants programs (NIS, DOD, etc). Most of them wanted to stay in the US after graduation. Few of them were allowed to. Doesn't that seem like a massive waste of our educational system? Why are we spending so much time and energy educating people and then refusing to allow them to stay in the US?
- Kudzu_Bob 14y ago
  No, what seems like a massive waste of our educational system is the notion that Federal tax dollars are going toward the higher education of non-citizens at the same time that millions of Americans either can't afford to go to school or are groaning under the weight of student debts. Odd that you should have missed that.
  - cema 14y ago
    I think in the case of STEM grad schools the Federal money finally goes where the best return on investment is. Professors, not government, decide whom to hire, roughly speaking.
    - Kudzu_Bob 14y ago
      The best return for whom? For the Americans forking over tax money used for the employment and credentialing of people not from this country?

krschultz 14y ago

Forget that angle for a second. When I sitting in my graduate engineer classes, 50%+ of the students were foreign. Most of them were working with professors on projects supported by the federal government via various grants programs (NIS, DOD, etc). Most of them wanted to stay in the US after graduation. Few of them were allowed to. Doesn't that seem like a massive waste of our educational system? Why are we spending so much time and energy educating people and then refusing to allow them to stay in the US?

Kudzu_Bob 14y ago
No, what seems like a massive waste of our educational system is the notion that Federal tax dollars are going toward the higher education of non-citizens at the same time that millions of Americans either can't afford to go to school or are groaning under the weight of student debts. Odd that you should have missed that.
- cema 14y ago
  I think in the case of STEM grad schools the Federal money finally goes where the best return on investment is. Professors, not government, decide whom to hire, roughly speaking.
  - Kudzu_Bob 14y ago
    The best return for whom? For the Americans forking over tax money used for the employment and credentialing of people not from this country?