Congress Screws American High-Tech Workers, Again

Congress Betrays The U.S. STEM Worker Once Again

The House of Representatives is out to destroy the American Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Professional. Republicans passed H.R. 6429 with theoxymoron title, STEM Jobs Act of 2012. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and this bill gives 55,000 foreigners a year who graduate from an American university with a Masters or PhD in these fields an employment sponsored green card. Democrats didn't like it, not because it will labor arbitrage American Technical Professionals and lock out some Americans from even being accepted into Masters and PhD university programs. No, Democrats don't like the idea of separating the agenda of giving those here illegally legal status from the corporate lobbyist never ending demand for more foreign guest worker Visas and turning the American higher education system into a glorified green card ATM. Democrats believe they will never get their unlimited migration agenda through Congress without sacrificing the American Science and Technology professional to the globalization wolves.

The claim is STEM jobs create other jobs. This is true, these professional occupations can spawn other jobs, as is typical with an employment multiplier effect derived from more disposable income as well as advanced research and development itself. Although STEM's multiplier effect assumes manufacturing and supportive positions are in the United States, which these days isn't usually the case. The problem is these Science and Engineering jobs are not positions in addition to, but in place of. In other words, we have worker substitution going on where Americans are fired, employers continue with their institutionalized age, sex and U.S. citizen discrimination and simply replace the fired American with a young, typically male, foreign one. Displacing an American from that job with a foreign one does nothing to increase jobs, help the economy, or innovate. Either worker can innovate and in fact many U.S. patent and copyright holders have actually been displaced already. Innovation is work sponsored. If one doesn't have a job in R&D, odds are they will not get their ideas into the market place or even registered. Worker substitution generally hurts the economy and it obviously hurts the worker being displaced. That's what is currently happening.

The great STEM shortage lie has been going on for years, in spite of overwhelming statistics there is no shortage of Americans with STEM college degrees.