Vivek Wadhwa wrote a thought provoking article for Businessweek that is spreading around the internet blogosphere like a wildfire. Wadhwa is an enigmatic writer who spares no words in exposing the dangers of offshore outsourcing and the harms caused by the importation of foreign guest workers. The Science Education Myth, October 26, 2007” in Businessweek catapulted him to a new level of internet celeb.

Wadhwa is somewhat of a heretic in the business community, and he will probably receive wide scale condemnation by many special interest groups for writing that article. The plutocrats that read BusinessWeek, and perhaps many at CIO, will probably be demanding his head because the article contains a little too much of the truth, and Wadhwa makes enough credible points to make most corporatocrats squirm.

Many high-tech workers, in contrast, are hailing Wadhwa as a new American hero that will break the back of the corporate robber barons. Before the idolatry turns into full fledged Wadhwamania, this essay offers some rational analysis behind the mythology, and offers some words of caution before jumping onto the Wadhwa bandwagon.

The first thing that really caught my eye in his new article is that during the time period from 1985 to 2000, about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce.

Let's consider just what those numbers mean. Every year, for the 15 year time period considered (1985-2000) there was a job deficit of 285,000 jobs per year. That translates to a total job creation deficit of 4,275,000. Pay attention to the time span -- those years were considered to be the boom times for high-tech careers. Numbers may not be available for the last 7 years but you can bet things are far worse now.

So here is the jobs scorecard for 15 years:

 2,250,000   S&E jobs were created
-6,525,000   S&E graduates
--------------
-4,275,000   jobs creation deficit

Put another way, we graduated more than 4 million science and engineering grads than the job market needed – but actually the situation was far worse than that number would indicate because it represents a severe undercount. Four million is probably at least 5 times too small!

So, during this long period of glutted job markets, what was the U.S. government doing to help the problem? Well, at the same time millions of S&E grads couldn't find jobs in their chosen profession, the government was solving an alleged "shortage" by giving incentives for companies to move jobs overseas and to import foreign workers to replace their more expensive American counterparts. Employers responded by dumping their U.S. employees by the tens of thousands and by hiring vast numbers of temporary guest workers to enter our domestic job market by using the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. Millions more entered the job market with employment based green cards (EB) that allowed them a path to citizenship.

Nobody knows exactly how to calculate exact numbers on how the visas contributed to the total job glut because many H-1Bs return home, and others convert their visas to green cards. Still others just let their visas go out of status and stay in the U.S. as "documented" illegal immigrants who have everything they need to function – for instance valid social security numbers, driver’s licenses, and many other documents they accumulated while working and living here.

Considering the huge surplus of workers during that time period, Wadhwa is quite correct to say that shortages just don’t exist. He is one of the few in the business world that have the

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (3 votes)

Reply