Perhaps the single part of President Bush's State of the Union address to win the most bipartisan praise was his call for a 10-year, $136 billion plan to boost scientific research and development funding, improve science and mathematics education, and increase the number of U.S. science and mathematics graduates. The proposal followed many of the recommendations of a recent National Academy of Sciences report by a high-powered list of scholars and corporate executives that warned America is doomed to a lower standard of living unless it repairs its “eroding” status as the world's leader in science and technology.
Given the starkness of the economic threat facing the United States, the president's initiative is welcome and overdue. But there is a big step he also could take that would produce dramatic results much more quickly: launching an all-out push to attract brilliant foreign scientists, engineers and mathematicians to the United States and to encourage top foreign students who are studying here to stay here after graduation.
Until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, visas for outstanding foreign students and graduates were not particularly difficult to come by. But in the years since, the U.S. government – trying to screen out potential terrorists – has put up far more obstacles.
Yet assuaging our national-security fears has put our economic security at risk. Between the visa obstacles, the perception of a rise in U.S. nativism and the eagerness of other nations to ramp up their own high-tech economies, the number of foreign students at top U.S. research universities is down.
Last spring, Microsoft founder Bill Gates called this official hostility to the world's best and brightest – especially the limits on temporary H-1B visas for technology workers – a huge and growing drag on the U.S. economy.
Some on Capitol Hill heeded Gates, but not enough. In December, the House blocked a Senate plan to add 30,000 H-1B visas annually. Representatives proved unable to distinguish between illegal immigrants and those with specialized skills whom we should badly want here.
President Bush should have denounced this economic know-nothingism in his State of the Union speech. It would have been in line with his frequent rebukes of immigrant-bashers.
But if Bush wants to avoid a direct confrontation with the House over the issue, he could still put his shoulder behind two of the National Academy of Sciences' other recommendations instead of touting the Senate's visa plan.
The first would provide an automatic one-year visa extension to foreign students who receive doctorates in science, technology, mathematics or engineering.
The second would reorient our immigration policies to give far more preference to applicants with doctoral-level science and engineering skills.
Taking such stands likely would inflame both the nativists on the right who see all immigration as bad and the labor unions and their allies on the left who think U.S. workers need protection from foreign talent. But if President Bush is the bold, visionary leader his admirers claim, then this is what he will do.
After all, it will be an utterly hollow victory if, in 10 years time, the U.S. school system starts producing far more scientists and engineers for an economy that no longer has jobs for them. Perhaps our best and brightest could emigrate to New Delhi or Shanghai.
