U.S Should Admit Foreign Scientists And High-Tech Employees

According to Price in CQ Researcher-Science in America, United States is facing scientist shortage, which is threatening the nation’s world leadership in science and technology, military supremacy and standard of living. The author said that the shortage of scientist in the nation is due to American science is becoming progressively worst, not enough Americans are choosing to study science so employers want to hire foreign high-tech workers and pay them lower wages. According to the Statistic of Advanced U.S Degrees Going to Foreigners, “foreigners earned a large percentage of the advanced degrees awarded by American universities in 2002 and 2003. More than 50 percent engineering doctorates went to non-Americans, and more than 40 percent of the engineering master’s degrees” (Price, 28). This statistic shows us that there are not many Americans choosing to study science and mathematics. “We are not growing enough here at home to sustain the demand we have in the country for skilled talent.” Says Oracle’s vice president Hoffman (Price, 29). To avoid future economic deficit, two fixes have been proposed. For a short-term fix, they propose loosening the immigration restrictions to import more high-skilled workers from overseas.

“Failure to address current and future worker shortages could mean a loss of American’s high technology leadership in the world” said 14 high-tech CEOs (Koch, 363). U.S companies need to locate future factories overseas if the shortage of high-tech American workers problem is still remaining. This will lead to loss of thousands of U.S jobs to overseas, they added. Technology revolution is really fast. It is a threat to the nation because it moves faster than the ability for us to train and produce more talented U.S scientists. In the near future, U.S will need 1.3 million of computers scientists. To loosen the immigration restrictions to allow more overseas talented scientists is part of the solution for short term. However, there are opponents say that the labor shortage is a myth. They say this is a road to access cheap labor from overseas. Those claims and predictions for the future are to threaten the Congress loosen the immigrations to admit more foreign workers. They claim that there are not much evidence and statistics to support the supply of the workers in the nation.

To overcome this problem, U.S should admit more foreign scientists and high-tech workers. There is another way for America to overcome this problem by improving pre-college education, to produce more college graduates with mathematics and sciences degrees and increase the research and development in the country, but such solution might take at least 5 years.