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America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

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Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#371

Post by jshevek »

iguy wrote: post #205
jshevek wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only after an influx of economic migrants. Without that influx of migrants, I don't think most of the pro brexit people would have been concerned about the free movement of people within Europe.

Doesn't free movement include economic migrants? That said, they have also had a lot of non-EU immigration. But my point was that free-movement between near-peer countries seems like almost pure benefit. And this was where the EU started, knocking down walls in benelux... you would struggle to get many people upset about that. Integration all the way to Romania etc. is more recent, really quite a different thing. The…

I was responding to a very short post by coding123. My point is that the free movement of people within Europe may have been a necessary condition for brexit, but it was not a sufficient condition. The free movement of Europeans did not lead directly to brexit. It was only after a massive influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East that we had brexit

I do not disagree with your claim about near peer countries.

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#372

Post by kamaal »

wenc wrote: post #340
CodeMage wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both of these would ensure that we can get smart and talented individuals from outside the US and would drastically improve the ability for the US to compete while continuing to provide broad-based wage increases. As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better e…

America's education is a paradox. The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed: Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough. Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to…

>>America's education is a paradox.

That is really not that hard to explain. Once you solve hunger, clothing, mobility and housing. You basically take away the most important of human instincts which drive a person to work insanely hard for success.

At that point a person has to call upon his internal human enterprise to succeed. That's hard.

America is just a victim of its own success. This is also called decadence.

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#373

Post by graycat »

anonzzzz wrote: post #327
graycat wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the comparison again controlling on country of origin. E.g., how do US citizen students with families from Japan compare with students still in Japan? Instead of Japan, substitute Canada, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, England, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Baltic countries, the Balkan countries, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, Poland, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Turkey, Iraq, Ir…

The US is not uniquely diverse, Canada and Australia among other countries have a higher percentage of foreign born population.

The OP was in part discussing education in the US and claiming that the education is inferior to the education in several other countries. Some of the evidence is some test scores on some tests given internationally.

Okay: We're considering education quality and using test scores as evidence.

Well, it is Social Science 101 (my wife's Ph.D. was in mathematical sociology, and my brother's Ph.D. was in political science) to control on other likely explanatory variables.

So, an obvious candidate alternate explanatory variable is culture of the country of the recent ancestors of the students.

So, to compare education in the US with that in, e.g., Japan, we should see how (A) US students of recent Japanese descent compare with (B) Japanese students in Japan. So, now are holding culture reasonably constant and, thus, doing better comparing the schools and whatever else we have not controlled on.

Not to control on culture would be grade F in Social Science 101 and give total garbage results.

I.e., no fair blaming the education in the US when the real cause of the differences is culture and not the education.

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#375

Post by rsa4046 »

wenc wrote: post #340
CodeMage wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both of these would ensure that we can get smart and talented individuals from outside the US and would drastically improve the ability for the US to compete while continuing to provide broad-based wage increases. As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better e…

America's education is a paradox. The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed: Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough. Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to…

Echoes David Goodstein's "Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates" from the early 90's[0]:

"The answer, I think, is that in education and in science, as in fast food and popular culture, America is not really worse than the rest of the world, we are merely a few years ahead of the rest of the world. What we are seeing here will happen everywhere soon enough. Our colleagues abroad can take what scant comfort they can find in the promise that our dilemmas in science and education are on the way, along with Big Macs and designer jeans ... Most elementary school teachers are poorly prepared to present even the simplest lessons in scientific or mathematical subjects. In many places, Elementary Education is the only college major that does not require even a single science course, and it is said that many students who choose that major do so precisely to avoid having to take a course in science. To the extent that is true, elementary school teachers are not merely ignorant of science, they are preselected for their hostility to science, and no doubt they transmit that hostility to their pupils, especially young girls for whom elementary school teachers must be powerful role models. Even those teachers who did have at least some science in college are not likely to be well prepared to teach the subject."

[0]http://www.geoffdavis.net/dartmouth/policy/elites.html

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#376

Post by [deleted] »

CodeMage wrote: post #226
firedrakerage wrote: post #11

I do not typically post, but these suggestions seem like genuine improvements to the existing system: "Kerr suggests allocating H-1Bs not by lottery as they are now, but by salary — the more that a company is willing to pay for a foreign worker, the quicker they can get a visa." "A second change would be to allow H-1B workers to apply for permanent residency green cards on their own, without having to be sponsored by…

> Both of these would ensure that we can get smart and talented individuals from outside the US and would drastically improve the ability for the US to compete while continuing to provide broad-based wage increases. As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better e…

[deleted]

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#377

Post by dang »

apcragg wrote: post #277
pitaj wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US colleges used to be affordable before the federal government started pouring money into them with guaranteed loans. It's not a free market, but one distorted by government intervention.

Oh yeah, all before all that government intervention those land Grant universities really pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

Please don't post like this here. If another comment is wrong, feel free to provide correct information, so we all learn something; or simply don't comment.

Edit: You've posted uncivilly to HN before. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#378

Post by carlmr »

sgc wrote: post #348
wenc wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's education is a paradox. The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed: Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough. Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to…

I can agree that the graduate level in the US is good, and sometimes the best. But as someone who studied in Europe and taught undergrads in the US, they were appallingly poor students, entitled, and lazy. The university was and is considered (roughly) in the top 15% in national academic rankings, and one of the top for its region. No way they were graduating at the same level as many other countries.

Yeah, I can only compare with Canadian undergrad and they were still far behind by 3rd and 4th year, even though the rankings show the universities higher. The rankings have little to do with quality of education and more with impact of research I presume (or they're entirely made up).

At the graduate level (Master/PhD) I'd say it becomes comparable, but there were very few Canadian students compared to Chinese and Iranians.

Re: America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away

#380

Post by geff82 »

JanSt wrote: post #289
geff82 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is this HackerNews mindset. Software can be done from anywhere, sure, and big German companies get it coded in India or East Europe. The high paying IT jobs here are not coders who produce software, but architects, business analysts, project managers, scrum masters, product owners, data scientists, IT consultants who work together with the client in person. The coding and system administration is offshored in a…

It's way cheaper to have competent software engineers than to add layers of analysts, managers, scrum masters or architects (who copy well known patterns). Most SEs are highly qualified not only on the technical side but also on the business side and possess quite a bit of domain knowledge. Besides that, most of enterprise IT is not rocket science, is it? ;-)

Sure you could make Enterprise IT a lot more leaner and probably add a lot of productivity doing so. This is, by the way, my private field of research: how can friction in Enterprise IT be avoided (my position is that you could do IT in big enterrise better with about a third of the people). But yet we are talking about the reality that we have right now, and right now (and probably in years to come) a lot of those in-between-IT-people are wanted and they make good money (what my entire original comment was about).
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