American Graduates Need Not Apply
One issue currently dividing conservatives is immigration, particularly regarding the H-1 B visa program. Many believe that a certain amount of immigration is necessary for U.S. corporations to recruit the best possible engineers, programmers, and so forth. They view the H1-B visa, which...
mindingthecampus.org
A senior partner at a large U.S. company admits corporations will skirt H-1B restrictions—leaving American graduates behind.
Even if they do recruit more graduates from U.S. colleges and universities, he told me, that doesn’t mean they’ll be hiring more Americans. Despite tighter H-1B restrictions, many of their new hires will still be foreign students on F-1 visas, who in the STEM fields are eligible to extend their stay and work in the U.S. for up to three years after graduating.
“Half the people we hire are from another country,” he said. “Universities are bringing in all these students from other countries because they pay full freight. So when we go on campuses to recruit, that’s our pool.”
He also noted that foreign students tend to perform better than their American counterparts, both in their college courses and on the battery of tests to which his company subjects applicants. That is obviously an indictment of native students, and it is something that, anecdotally speaking, I have noticed myself: in my classes, foreign students—and I have a lot of them now—tend to outperform American students.