Breitbart News reports on a September 2018 report from the Pentagon that mentions the security implications associated with the significant number of Chinese STEM graduates working and studying in the USA. According to the report (“Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States”), "American universities are major enablers of China’s economic and military rise."
Why might this be? A simple look at STEM PhD statistics shows that the USA is training a disproportionate number of Chinese students:
- 37% of STEM PhDs were earned by temporary visa holders
- >25% of STEM graduates in the U.S. are Chinese nationals
Add to this the large numbers of Indians, Koreans, Arabs, Turks (etc), I would be surprised if more than 30% of STEM PhD students are actually domestic American citizens, or even westerners from Anglo-American countries. In Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, I believe 85+% of all PhD and Masters students are foreigners.
According to Breitbart:
- >50,000 China-born technology graduates begin working in the United States each year, either with temporary work-permits or with permanent green cards
- universities hire 10,000 Chinese graduate-researchers for federal projects
- companies sponsor roughly 10,000 Chinese for green cards each year.
- the resident working population of Chinese technology experts is at least 150,000, not counting the many Chinese who have already gotten green cards or become citizens.
There are two issues at play in the Breitbart piece:
- The fact that some Chinese citizens are clearly engaged in forms of espionage, which makes the large numbers of Chinese researchers and professionals a clear security risk.
- The fact that the USA is training massive numbers of students from a competitor nation. Each Chinese student enrolled in a PhD program in the USA is one fewer domestic student who could be enrolled in the same program.
A third issue, not discussed by Breitbart, is the following:
- Is it a wise idea to import a technical elite from other countries (not just China)?
The USA is clearly importing a legion of temporary workers, many of whom obtain green cards. The software industry, for instance, is so heavily foreign that Silicon Valley has a predominantly Asian workforce.
Given that these jobs are some of the most highly remunerative in the USA, shouldn't we be concerned about the fact that the lion's share of the best jobs are going to people who have no deep attachment to American (or even Western) culture?
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