Decline and Fall

We are profoundly concerned with the flood of illegal immigrants, drugs and gangsters from south of the border. As I have pointed out in numerous previous blogs, Mexico is melting away in a drug-lord led civil war against the elected government, corruption attacking democracy, fueled with weapons smuggled south from the U.S. It seems that a bad situation will only grow worse.

But there is another much more disturbing side to America’s policies on immigration – and not just those statutes dealing with drug-lords and undocumented aliens, but those laws, like immigration quotas and sections of the Patriot Act, that make even legal entry much more complex and time-consuming. Even overlooking the negative impact on tourism, we are severely hurting both our short term and long term growth and diplomacy goals by using terrorism and the drain on social services from undocumented workers as excuses to close or severely limit entrance across our borders, both to potential university students and highly educated immigrants.

The fact that our producing 60,000 to 70,000 PhD’s annually in mathematics, applied sciences and engineering within the United States falls drastically short of our internal needs has dire consequences for all Americans. With this financial meltdown, we have new a core focus on science and math needs as critical for our entire educational system, but until we start rolling out the high-end result of that pressure, the number of hard patents filed in the United States (vs. softer, business method patents that have limited underlying value) is dropping every year, while such patent applications are soaring in places like India and China.

We risk losing the technology race that we have always led. And in this managed depression, this is a race we cannot lose if we are to find general national prosperity again. “‘We are watching the decline and fall of the United States as an economic power — not hypothetically, but as we speak,’ said Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of Intel.” April 12^th NY Times. There a thousands of engineering openings across America that go begging – engineering skills that are absolutely necessary components to spur our own job growth – a desperate need as unemployment records spiral upwards. And even where engineers slip through all of these restrictions, they are often forced to leave wives and children behind, because the rules just won’t make exceptions. So many of these engineers emigrate to more hospitable countries where industries will soon eclipse their American counterparts.

Immigration has been profoundly beneficial to our economic growth. If we just pulled the Asian-born immigrants out of this country, our telecommunications system would coast to a stop, our advancements in all level of computer science and all phases of engineering would grind to crawl and advances in biotech and medicine would glide to a tiny fraction of current achievements. A Duke University study, released on January 4, 2007, examined engineering and technology start-ups in the United States between 1995 and 2005. More than one in four of these companies were founded by immigrants (most from Asia, particularly India), creating approximately 450,000 jobs and $52 billion in sales in 2005 alone.

We wouldn’t be the great nation we are, a technology leader, without them. “Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard…. The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove, the Hungarian-born co-founder of Intel; Jerry Yang, the Chinese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google’s Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin.” 4/12 NY Times.

It’s time for all of us to grow concerned about this absurd flaw in our immigration policies. How many Americans will lose job opportunities because some brilliant mind was forced to take those job-creating skills elsewhere? Unfortunately, it’s a statistic that seems almost impossible to measure, but tech company after tech company has floods of actual experience dealing with a system that seem quite content to cut off its nose to spite its face.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.