Quick takes // By Ben FrankelSTEM education, STEM jobs, and immigration
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) is a leading critic of immigration reform which would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants, and a chief proponent of limiting the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States. One of his arguments is that Americans with college STEM degrees cannot get a job in their fields because these jobs are taken by skilled foreigners. There are two problems with Sessions’s argument: First, his definition of “STEM job” is so narrow, that Apple CEO Tim Cook and a Noble Prize scientist who works as a university professor would not be regarded as holding STEM jobs; second, his argument contradicts what basic economic teaches: Skilled immigrants contribute to American prosperity and security, and the labor market is not a zero-sum proposition.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) is a leading critic of immigration reform which would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants, and a chief proponent of limiting the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States. One of his arguments is that Americans with college STEM degrees cannot get a job in their fields because these jobs are taken by skilled foreigners.
Session says that 74 percent of Americans with STEM degrees – he says this comes to about eleven million Americans – are currently working in non-STEM jobs. He goes on to note that Census data show that only 3.8 million Americans with STEM degrees hold STEM jobs.
To Sessions, this is proof that foreigners steal jobs which would otherwise go to STEM-educated Americans – and an argument why the United States should limit immigration, including immigration of highly skilled foreigners.
The Wall Street Journal begs to differ. In an editorial (“The Sessions Complaint: Defining down the U.S. science and tech job market,” Wall Street Journal, 27 April 2015) it says that Sessions’s – and the Census’s – numbers are based on artificial and narrow definitions.
Indeed, a just-published study by the National Foundation for American Policy notes that under the definition used by Sessions and the Census, Apple CEO Tim Cook and a Noble Prize scientist who works as a university professor would not be regarded as holding STEM jobs.
Another recently published study – by the National Science Foundation – writes that:
In 2010, 16.5 million individuals — including many in non-STEM jobs, such as sales, marketing and management — reported that their job required at least a bachelor’s degree level of science and engineering (S&E) expertise. This represents about three times the number of individuals working in occupations classified as S&E (5.4 million).
Dan Arvizu, chairman of the National Science Board (NSB), said:
The character of the STEM workforce is much more expansive than when NSF was founded sixty-five years ago. New industries and the growing importance of STEM skills in jobs not traditionally thought of as STEM, means that we must revisit what we mean by a “STEM worker.”
The WSJ notes that it made a mistake in a 25 April editorial, in which it attributed to Sessions the statement that there are six million high-tech STEM jobs in the United States — but the data the Sessions does cite “defines the STEM market even more narrowly” (WSJ emphasis), and thus his claim that highly skilled foreigners steal STEM jobs from well-educated Americans is based on a definition of the U.S. STEM market which distorts reality.
The WSJ concludes: “The STEM job details can be eye-glazing, but the facts support what basic economic teaches: Skilled immigrants enhance American prosperity, and the labor market isn’t a zero-sum proposition.”
We agree.
— Read more in The Most Misleading Statistics in Immigration: Examining Claims about Jobs for Science and Engineering Degree Holders, NFAP Policy Brief (National Foundation for American Policy, April 2015); and Revisiting the STEM Workforce: A Companion to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 (National Science Foundation, 4 February 2015)
Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire
