Credit: Bart Sadowski
By most objective measures, the United States is the undisputed world leader in science and innovation, whether it's funding for research and development, the number of PhD students it graduates or its share of the world's patents. For the world's wealthiest nation, this is hardly a remarkable feat. What is remarkable is that the US accomplished this with a supply of domestic talent whose skills in math and science are, also according to most objective measures, merely mediocre.
Luckily, in the past, many excellent foreign students have shouldered the load, preferring to come here to study and work than stay in their home countries. This import of talent has been valued at more than $13 billion per year. In US science as a whole, a third of all doctoral students are foreign born; in engineering, the figure is nearly twice that.
At times, our dependence on foreign talent mirrors our dependence on foreign oil. For instance, both are affected by terrorism: New immigration rules implemented in the wake of 9/11 created a backlog at the INS so severe that the number of student visas issued fell by nearly a third from its peak in 2001. If the number of visas issued would have remained flat—though up to that point the number had been trending up—the restrictive new rules mean that in the past five years the US issued 300,000 fewer visas, or the equivalent of an entire year's worth of matriculating foreign-born math and engineering students. Historically, more than half of foreign students who earned their degree in the US remained here to work.
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In March of 2003, the house committee on science convened a special meeting to address this growing concern. During the meeting, legislators heard testimony concerning the harsh reality many graduate students and post-doctoral fellows had to contend with: The delay in visa renewals meant that some of these researchers were effectively exiled for months at a time. The committee responded by recommending that overly stringent security requirements be eased. Since then, the situation has improved, and the number of issued visas has begun to rebound.
Unfortunately, relaxing border patrol hasn't totally solved the problem. The supply of foreign students—again, much like crude oil—is affected by demand in other countries. According to the NSF's 2005 National Science and Engineering Indicators report, "Asian locations that have been the source of two-thirds of foreign doctoral candidates in the United States are developing their own [science and technology] infrastructures."
Thanks to newfound wealth and expanding economies, China and India are quickly becoming more attractive places for their homegrown scientists and engineers to stay—or to return to once they have completed US degrees. The number of foreign science and engineering students staying to work in the US peaked in 1996 and has been declining ever since.
Meanwhile, both the percentage of doctoral degrees granted to foreigners and the percentage of scientists in the US who were born elsewhere are at all-time highs, allowing the US to maintain the blistering pace at which it creates new science and engineering jobs. In the past decade alone, the demand for these skill-sets grew at three times the rate of overall civilian employment, to 4.6 million positions.
If we assume that innovation is essential to economic growth, then our entire economy is more dependent than ever on the labors of bright people born elsewhere.
If this supply of foreign minds is threatened, as it appears to be, by a combination of market forces and government blunders, our only alternative is to cultivate a homegrown supply of science professionals. That means tapping high school seniors who are doing worse in science than at any other point in the past decade, according to results from the Dept. of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, which was released last week.