Laughing and Crying

Laughing and Crying
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
May 23, 2007
Copyright by The New York Times



First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.

I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, one of America's great science and
engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first
grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them
Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read their names
and each was handed their doctorate . in biotechnology,
computing, physics and engineering . by the school's
president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every
one of the newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign
born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming .
"Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang" . I thought that the
entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to
be Chinese, until "Paul Shane Morrow" saved the day. It was
such a caricature of what President Jackson herself
calls "the quiet crisis" in high-end science education in
this country that you could only laugh.

Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to
build universities and a culture of learning that attract
the world's best minds. My complaint . why I also wanted to
cry . was that there wasn't someone from the Immigration
and Naturalization Service standing next to President
Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of
these foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become
Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we
can't educate enough of our own kids to compete at this
level, we'd better make sure we can import someone else's,
otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.

It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders .
as wide as possible . to attract and keep the world's first-
round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone
increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key
differentiator is human talent. I'm serious. I think any
foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country . in any
subject . should be offered citizenship. I want them. The
idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is
crazy.

Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is
pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B
visas available to companies that want to bring in skilled
foreign workers and the number of employment-based green
cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay
here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies
need them now, because we're not training enough engineers,
but they will, over time, start many more companies and
create many more good jobs than they would possibly
displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that . and
where innovation happens matters. It's still where the best
jobs will be located.

Folks, we can't keep being stupid about these things. You
can't have a world where foreign-born students dominate
your science graduate schools, research labs, journal
publications and can now more easily than ever go back to
their home countries to start companies . without it
eventually impacting our standard of living . especially
when we're also slipping behind in high-speed Internet
penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in
the world in 2001 to 15th today.

My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders
of the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make
this an issue in the presidential campaign by creating a
movement to demand that candidates focus on our digital
deficits and divides. (See: http://www.techpresident.com.)
Mr. Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of
New York City in 2005 on a platform calling for low-cost
wireless access everywhere, notes that "only half of
America has broadband access to the Internet." We need to
go from "No Child Left Behind," he says, to "Every Child
Connected."

Here's the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have
sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country . oxygen
needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate
change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor
at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming
book "The First Campaign," which deals with this theme. So
right now, it's mostly governors talking about these
issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can
do without Washington being focused and leading.

Which is why we've got to bring our occupation of Iraq to
an end in the quickest, least bad way possible . otherwise
we are going to lose Iraq and America. It's coming down to
that choice.