3. Student and work visas should be reserved for the very best from abroad (and a few deserving refugees/asylees).

Beyond the guest-work programs, fewer permanent visas need to be steered to people who are not highly skilled.   The obvious place to start is to give out fewer F visas for students to study in the USA.   Instead of belly-aching after the fact that US tax-victims have been funding 70% of their education, we should stop bringing in any but the very best.   Rather than hundreds of thousands, we should be limiting them to a few thousand, certainly less than 10K.   The drop in foreign graduate assistants and foreign PhDs will increase compensation to levels at which US students will once again be able to afford to go through such programs.   Currently, the direct and opportunity costs for a US student to attend graduate school are higher than the life-time earnings increase and greater employment stability from having the master's or PhD will net them.   Matloff on ACM study   2005 September: BusinessWeek

"in 1910, only 13% of American adults had graduated high school and fully one-quarter had no more than 5 years of [education].   At the same time, only 2.7% of Americans had college degrees...   [By 1929, the percentage of the US population with HS diplomas had increased to 30%.]   there's no reason any employer should be permitted to make an end run around our vast continental labor force of more than 150M people unless the prospective immigrant in question has unique, remarkable abilities, and would make an enormous contribution to the productive capacity of the nation.   Perhaps the simplest way to approach this would be to admit anyone who scores above 140 [I would have said 160+] on an English-language IQ test [or an aggregate ACT score above 34 or aggregate SAT score above 1560 or "new" aggregate SAT score above 2100 or aggregate GRE above 1615]." --- Mark Krikorian   2008-06-12

"Earlier this year, students would show up for class each day at the Jalpaiguri Engineering College in West Bengal -- and find no teachers.   The Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Information Technology had just 1 full-time teacher (it's supposed to have 20).   Finally, in May, the students -- who faced impending exams despite having had no instruction -- went into the streets to protest...   'Out of the huge number of engineering and science graduates that India produces, only 25% to 30% can be regarded as suitable.', says Kiran Karnik, head of NASSCOM...   Professor Mao Shoulong of Renmin University.   Experts also complain that Chinese schools emphasize rote memorization, which often 'detracts from the quality of education'..." --- Melinda Liu & Sudip Mazumdar 2007-08-14 _M$NBC_/_NewSpeak_ "The Mythical Million"   2007-08-14

Academic dishonesty widespread in India Bio LIne   2004-12-31

Indian students demand to be allowed to cheat   Azizur Rahman _The Courier Mail_   2003-07-10

Employment-based immigration displaces U.S. workers and depresses wages.   It's a clear matter of supply, demand and price in dynamic balance, and we see it in the statistics.   US students and workers are very responsive to market conditions, shifting to different fields when employment is less remunerative or less available.   1998   S. Richfield IEEE-USA   Matloff: Immigration & the Computer Industry in the NY Times   1998-02-04   1998-02-25 IEEE-USA   1998-05-31   2006-12-07   2006-12-07 SF Chronicle   BusinessWeek   graphs of employment data

What is needed is obvious.   The H-1B program should be both reduced and over-hauled.   Valuable H-1B and L and O visas have gone to nurses' assistants, chefs, models, sleazy "actresses", and newbie programmers, instead of going to the "best and brightest", those of "distinguished merit", "the pre-eminent".   2006-04-04

To encourage executives to make good-faith efforts to recruit and retain highly-skilled USA citizen workers, we should improve tax breaks for firms which fly in USA citizens for interviews, which relocate US citizen new-hires and retained employees, and which educate or train new and retained USA citizen employees.

Some specific firms have engaged in ethically questionable activities.   When they do so, it should be much more difficult for them to recruit bright, well-educated, savvy, and ethical STEM workers.
* Lockheed Martin has been caught gaming their red light camera systems in several cities to enhance revenues, placing them at busy intersections rather than intersections where there have been problems, and then playing with shortening the timing of the lights and placement of the detector loops so as to maximize revenues.
* Skype, Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and M$ were caught helping the Red Chinese dictators squelch free political and religious speech.   Yahoo! has repented and promised to pay restitution to the families of those victimized, but the others continue on their unethical ways.
* M$ had to be sued for the perma-temp scam, claiming full-time permanent employees were outside contractors so as to avoid paying benefits.
* Google, it turns out, has been setting their job requirements, not at what was needed to do the job the candidate is to be hired to do, but several levels up.   This, by implication, means that they've been trapping people into jobs that do not make use of and allow them to develop their abilities, and under-paying them for their skills and knowledge and credentials and experience.
* Oracle, Sun, SAP and Siebel despise, disparage and express disrespect for privacy, and develop and provide services for firms to customize data-based systems to violate people's privacy.
* Accenture changed its name from Anderson Consulting and moved its base of operations to dodge responsibility for ethical breaches.
* Body shopping is rampant.   There seem to be thousands of these dishonest outfits -- based in the USA and around the world -- but the names that come to mind are EDS, BAE, BEA, Accenture, E&Y, Perot Systems, IBM Global Services, Wipro, Tata, Convergys, Robert Half, ManPOWER, M$, Oracle...   The thing they hold in common is trying to misrepresent compensation.   They typically dangle a higher per-hour wage, but cut benefits of all kinds as compared to real employment: pay and training during "down-time" or "bench-time", paid vacations, holidays, insurance, severance... The net effect is a significant decrease in total compensation per year, per decade, and life-time.   And the word is that if you have more than n weeks of bench-time, you're simply dumped.
* Countless firms promised options and/or pensions, but set impossible vesting times, and then dumped employees just before they would have been vested, or even after they were supposedly "vested" but before they could actually collect, and e.g. turned the pension obligation over to the government pension guarantee agency.
All such firms should find it nearly impossible to recruit anyone the least bit savvy, and should need to pay a steep premium.

There was no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

There is no shortage of talented USA citizen STEM workers.

No credible evidence of impending shortage of talented US citizen STEM workers has been produced.

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