By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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Published: May 23, 2007
First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.
I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, one of America's great science and engineering schools, so I
had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came
on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read
their names and each was handed their doctorate - in biotechnology,
computing, physics and engineering - by the school's president, Shirley
Ann Jackson.
The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the
newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as
the foreign names kept coming - "Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang" - I
thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going
to be Chinese, until "Paul Shane Morrow" saved the day. It was such a
caricature of what President Jackson herself calls "the quiet crisis" in
high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.
Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to build
universities and a culture of learning that attract the world's best
minds. My complaint - why I also wanted to cry - was that there wasn't
someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to
President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these
foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do
their research and innovation here. If we can't educate enough of our
own kids to compete at this level, we'd better make sure we can import
someone else's, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.
It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders - as wide as
possible - to attract and keep the world's first-round intellectual
draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same
innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent. I'm
serious. I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country -
in any subject - should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea
that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.
Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is pleading with
Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas available to companies
that want to bring in skilled foreign workers and the number of
employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want
to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need
them now, because we're not training enough engineers, but they will,
over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than
they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that -
and where innovation happens matters. It's still where the best jobs
will be located.
Folks, we can't keep being stupid about these things. You can't have a
world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate
schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily
than ever go back to their home countries to start companies - without
it eventually impacting our standard of living - especially when we're
also slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita.
America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.
My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of the
Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an issue in the
presidential campaign by creating a movement to demand that candidates
focus on our digital deficits and divides. (See:
http://www.techpresident.com .) Mr.
Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in
2005 on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere,
notes that "only half of America has broadband access to the Internet."
We need to go from "No Child Left Behind," he says, to "Every Child
Connected."
Here's the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up
almost all the oxygen in this country - oxygen needed to discuss
seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness,
notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of
the upcoming book "The First Campaign," which deals with this theme. So
right now, it's mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr.
Graff, but there is only so much they can do without Washington being
focused and leading.
Which is why we've got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end in the
quickest, least bad way possible - otherwise we are going to lose Iraq
and America. It's coming down to that choice.