Tag Archives: us immigration

US Immigration & Education Policy for Students on the F1 Visa

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Silicon Valley, an area and name synonymous with innovation, dynamic and entrepreneurs at their finest. The best minds from ar0und the globe converging to create the ideas that are shaping the next 100 years of our collective futures.

An area situated just outside of San Francisco and surrounding the prestigious Stanford University whose alumni is a who’s who of the elite from the founders of Hewlett Packard of yesteryear to Sun Microsystems a decade ago to Google and Yahoo today and virtually everything in between. It is the Meca of our times!

Why is this the case?

Well it has a lot to do with the US Higher Education Institutions and system being the finest in the world. Universities like Harvard, Yale and of course Stanford have been the attracting these fine minds from around the world on the F1 Visa as students and studying for their Bachelors, Master and PhD qualifications under the expert tutelage of the world’s most dynamic professors. These students have long known if they work hard and achieve, they too had access to the American Dream of starting a company and making a fortune via work visas like the H1B visa or E3 visa and then later permanent residency and citizenship via a US Green Card.

What has since happened?

Well quite frankly politics has happened. Immigrants have been unfairly, unjustly and quite innaccurately blamed for US economic ills and US Immigration policy has resulted insituations where by things like an H1B Visa Lottery, H1B Visa Quota, Green Card Lottery, and general delays in the US Immigration system meaning some of the smartest minds in the globe have been forced to wait 10-15 years in the same role just so their Green Card application and thus permanent residency status can be processed successfully.

So this has resulted in what publications like Tech Crunch and esteemed academics from Harvard and Duke fame like Vivek Wadhwa have coined the US reverse brain drain. The ultimate result of which would see Silicon Valley now longer near the Bay area of California but in Bangalore, India or the southern provinces of China or even I am sure to the horror of many in the US who spew the vile anti-immigrant language, the Middle East.

1 in 4 tech companies in the US are started by Immigrants including beheamoths like Google, Yahoo and eBay so it doesn’t take Einstein (himself an immigrant to the US) to see the detrimental effect this has to the US worker and economy as a whole. Of course you rarely here that from politicians more interested in cheap sound bites and their next book deal than actual benefit for their country from educated decision making.

According to Tech Crunch “U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.”

The Bay Area Council, the Campaign for College Opportunity and IHELP showed that the US needs a 90% upswing in people graduating with degrees in science, technology, math or engineering to keep up with all the new jobs being created in that discipline. Essentially that what made Silicon Valley great may no longer exist and you may see this gradually shift elsewhere.

A majority of the world’s economic growth comes from India, China, Brazil, Eastern Europe and even Africa. Most of those countries have a much better social support structure than the US and certainly much cheaper costs for higher education from ever improving academic institutions. If an aspiring entrepreneur is serious evaluating choices for a great career and to be a global sucess in the next 20 years, the answer is increasingly NOT the US. Particularly when you consider ridiculous anti-immigrant policies like the H-1B restrictions considered by congress.

Make no mistake the US greatest threat to it’s own prosperity is itself and it’s own Economic, Immigration and Social policies like Education and Health.  Let’s all hope sensible, reasoned and rational decisions are made going forward because as it stands now we are looking at a bleak future ahead.

CJ

Why Is US Immigration Policy Used As A Tool of Fear?

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Well the issue of immigration is debated all around the US every day and is always among the Top 10 issues in Congress and a headline issue of every day. While it certainly not as emotional an issue as the abortion and Roe v Wade debate in the US it is not that far behind.

Why?

Well Immigration essentially comes down to the core issue of race and thus how many people of other races and nationalities does the US want to allow into its current racial mix at any point in time. Thus when looked at from that perspective it is easy to see how it used a tool of propaganda on all sides to further an agenda they may have. For as we all well know Race according to many was (and to some today still is) the major devicive issue in the US in its history

History

With each new racial group that came to the US there was negative feeling towards them by the local populations at time. Whether it be the Chinese who came to California during the Gold Rush, the Russians and Eastern Europeans that came following the Soviet Revolution, the Italians and Jews who came late in the 19th and early in the 20th century or the Irish a few generations before that following famine back home, no group has been immune from being ostracized by the mainstream at the time.

So this issue goes well beyond the Africans who came to these shores as slaves, the Latinos from the South who are viewed as lowering the standard of living and wages by many locals or the Indians who are supposedly taking all the jobs from hard working Americans today.

In each generation, politicians and community leaders have sort to exploit the newest groups at the time who have yet to form into powerful enough numbers to have a strong voice to stand up to the majority groups. They are the easy target to blame for a bad economy, lack of jobs, crime and anything else that may stick if voiced often enough

What Is The Reality?

I have spent a lot of words in a lot of posts writing about the successes of the Immigrant worker both now and in the past and how the US is what it is today because of a robust and open Immigration policy coupled with personal freedoms that most nations only dream of.

However history has taught us that once a group or a nation becomes satisfied, closed off and ceases to be dynamic it no longer grows and is eventually surpassed by other societies where this is happening. From Egypt to Greece to Rome to the Mongols to the more recent colonial empires headed by the Great British Empire have all fallen victim to this curse.

In the end most of the Empires history will record that their primary source of decline from being the pre-eminent nation of their time was due to mostly problems from within. So while wars later in their history like the World Wars of the 20th century for the British or the attacks from the Barbarians and others to the Romans help precipitate their fall, it was only possible because of the sense of self indulgence, selfishness and infighting within and thus no forward thinking.

So while the US today seems to publicly view Arab terrorists as the greatest threats to its security and 2 emerging powers from Asia in China and India as its greatest threats to economic superiority, the real threat is within.

When Teddy Roosevelt declared many parts of the US like Yellowstone as National Parks, when Carnegie helped build the US rail system, a humble mayor from NY decided on a street grid for Manhattan with a Central Park in the middle and men like Ford, Bell and Edison created things and ideas that would last long after they were gone, investment in future was paramount.

Today it is just ensuring quarterly earnings are met for companies or that mid term elections are won every 2 years with short term promises. The truth is that if General Electric the company Edison founded was assessing his trying over a 100 times and years to eventually invent the light bulb today, it might scrap the project much earlier as too risky to meet a quarterly earnings number.

So next time you hear a conversation or a news bulletin about Immigration reform, it is not just whether Illegal Immigrants have a path to citizenship or how many Indians make up the H1B visa numbers, it is really a discussion about the future of the entire United States and its place in the world.

As is enscribed on the Statue of Liberty and the fact that over 100 million US citizens (one third) are descendants of Ellis Island, a more open and understanding policy towards Immigration will ultimately pay dividends for all of the US.

CJ