Immigration update

On Visit to Border, Obama Pushes to Revive Immigration Reform

Why aren’t we keeping the engineers we graduate?

That’s from this report (pdf) by Third Way, which does a good job explaining the basic shape of the river: We make it very easy for talented students to come here, and very hard for them to stay. That mattered less when China, India, and many of the other countries that contributed bright students to our universities had few attractive opportunities to lure them back home, and it would matter less if we were graduating more students in the hard sciences ourselves. But those days are over.

Now there’s lots of opportunity in China and India (and Singapore and Brazil and...) and so talented foreign engineers are less interested in signing up for an uncertain series of temporary visas. So if we don’t reform the laws so we keep more of these students, or we don’t find some way to graduate more of these students on our own, we’re going to start finding ourselves at a real disadvantage in some extremely key sectors. This is one of those policy problems that’s very easy to solve as a technical matter — just let these students stay — but very difficult to solve as a political matter.