The U.S. is graduate school to the world. And the recently failed legislative attempts to curb legal entry of foreign nationals into the country make it likely that, for better or for worse, it will stay that way. While U.S. society as a whole benefits from having access to the world's best and brightest, some individual U.S. citizen scientists and engineers out of work or in dead-end jobs haven't felt so fortunate.
The academic research and teaching enterprise in the U.S. needs a lot of highly skilled people. But after four or five years or more as a postdoc, many scientists believe they have paid their dues and yearn for more permanent employment. Some argue that foreign-citizen Ph.D.s are squeezing some U.S.-citizen Ph.D.s out of satisfying jobs. The truth, however, is that U.S. law makes it exceptionally difficult to hire foreign nationals who don't have permanent resident status into either industrial or academic positions.
In the past 10 years, non-U.S. citizens have received an increasing share of U.S. science and engineering Ph.D. degrees in general and of chemistry and chemical engineering degrees in particular. According to data published last month by the National Science Foundation, 47% of the 19,219 doctorates conferred by U.S. universities in the physical and natural sciences and engineering in 1995 were earned by non-U.S. citizens, up from 34% a decade earlier. For chemistry, 42% of the 2,116 doctoral degrees conferred in 1995 went to foreign students, up from 27% in 1986. Foreign students accounted for an even larger share of chemical engineering degrees, with 58% of the 699 doctoral degrees given for work in chemical engineering in 1995 going to foreign nationals, up from 52% a decade earlier.
The number of non-U.S. citizens who earned a doctorate in chemistry actually declined a little in 1995 after peaking in 1994. Much of the increase during the past several years is attributable to Ph.D. degrees received by Chinese students who were granted permanent residence in the U.S. by the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1993. This law, in effect, gave mass political asylum to all students from China studying in the U.S. at the time of the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing.
Many foreign students do plan to stay in the U.S. Almost all of the 1995 chemistry and chemical engineering Ph.D. recipients with permanent resident visas and with definite plans say they intend to stay in the U.S. According to NSF, of those on temporary visas, about 79% of chemistry Ph.D.s and 64% of chemical engineering Ph.D.s with definite plans said they will remain in the U.S. after receiving their degrees at least long enough to complete a postdoc.
"This year, we're going to have about 250 or so chemistry Ph.D.s who will stay in temporary [postdoctoral] positions much longer than they should," says chemist David K. Lavallee, provost at City College of New York. In 1995, Lavallee, who calls this number of temporary positions "the job gap," headed up the American Chemical Society's Presidential Task Force on the Study of Doctoral Education in Chemistry. "After your third or fourth year in a temporary position, you're really underemployed."
He says that nearly 60% of the foreign students who receive chemistry Ph.D.s remain in the U.S. for at least five years after receiving their degrees. "So out of the roughly 900 foreign students who get chemistry Ph.D.s, we will expect about 500 to remain in the country at least five years or longer."
He believes that the 3% absolute unemployment rate for Ph.D. chemists - those unemployed and seeking employment - is deceptive. "The problem is that people are not finding satisfactory employment in a reasonable time. Three percent doesn't tell the whole story."
Lavallee contends, "If industry did not have such a ready supply of foreign students to hire and they believed there was a need in the area, perhaps they would support graduate school scholarships to train people in the fields they thought were important."
However, when asked if he thinks that foreign nationals are taking the jobs of U.S. citizens, Joel Shulman, manager of external relations at Procter & Gamble, says: "I don't think so at all. There is absolutely no reason to hire a foreign national for a job that you can find a U.S. citizen to fill because of the time and expense in getting somebody permanent residency." He estimates the expense to be about $10,000 to $15,000 in attorneys' fees and advertising along with about 50 hours of a manager's time.
But sometimes employers find that a foreign graduate is better qualified for the position that is available. In some instances, foreign students may be the only people available to the employer.
P&G, for example, "is among a fairly large number of companies that hire foreign national scientists who fit very specific technical requirements with the intention of sponsoring them for permanent residency," says Shulman. "A lot of companies, for example, software companies and the like, hire foreign nationals on a temporary basis with no intention of keeping them permanently."
That's not P&G's way. "We will only hire foreign national scientists with the intent of keeping them employed in the U.S. long-term," Shulman says. "This is a much more difficult, more expensive, and time-consuming project than hiring a U.S. citizen or permanent resident." He explains:" To hire someone who is not a permanent resident or citizen, you've first got to sponsor them for an H-1B visa, which is relatively easy to obtain. You just need to apply to the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) to verify that the individual's wages are prevailing wages. That's relatively straightforward."
Then it gets hard. The two most prevalent ways to sponsor a person for permanent residence are to go through labor certification or to certify that the person is an outstanding scientist or researcher. "To go through labor certification, you have to assure the Department of Labor that this foreign national is not taking a job from a U.S. citizen or permanent resident," Shulman says. "This involves running ads and showing that the people responding to the ad will not meet the requirements of the job. For industry, that is a fairly time-consuming and expensive process.
"Where you run the ad is dictated to you by the Department of Labor or their surrogate, which is usually the state department of labor. If it's a chemist you're trying to hire, more often than not, you have to run it in C&EN. The whole purpose of running that ad is to verify that there isn't somebody else who is qualified for the job.
"If you find a citizen or permanent resident who fits the job's requirements, the labor department will not allow the foreign national to obtain employment-based permanent residency. And that person will have to leave the country when their H-1B visa expires," he says.
An alternate route to the labor certification process is to sponsor a person for permanent residence as an outstanding researcher as classified by INS. "That means the individual has an international reputation in his or her field as evidenced by a set of criteria specified by INS," says Shulman.
One suggestion for helping to ease pressures on the job market is limiting foreign Ph.D. enrollment in U.S. graduate schools. Reginald P. T. Tomkins, professor of chemistry at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, says that "flies in the face of what America is all about. This country has thrived on people coming in over the years in good and bad times. They come in and they make a contribution to the country." He acknowledges that "everything is very competitive. When industry is looking for a person, it is looking for the best person in a particular area. Whether the person originally came from Vietnam or China or Africa, if the person has the skills and the dedication to work hard and anything else they might be looking for, that's the person industry takes and, I think, ought to be taking."
Tomkins, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from England, teaches in a university with a high proportion of foreign nationals whom he describes as wonderful students, who should, actually, be seen as a positive influence on American students, raising the standards.
Tomkins believes the cultural diversity brought by international students is an important benefit. "I work a lot with industry," he says. "Every time I make a visit, I see a very diverse population in industry. I think it's good for students to experience this diverse population in college. Whether they are American or not, students need to be able to mix with students from Vietnam, from India, and from Latin America who they will one day be working alongside in industry, academia, or in government labs."
Lavallee says some of the schools with predominant enrollments of foreign students may be contributing to the underemployment problem. "The reason it is important for schools to take a very hard look at the number of foreign students they're admitting is not directly related to the job market, but indirectly. If a school cannot recruit domestic students, there has to be a question about the purpose of the doctoral education at that institution.
"If it is to promote the research rather than education per se, there are other ways to get the research done with permanent research staff. If foreign students are being recruited simply because the university needs a certain number of teaching assistants, which happens in some schools, perhaps they should be hiring master's degree candidates to do that," he says.
Lavallee doubts that the primary motive in recruiting lots of foreign students is "to fill the altruistic wishes of the United States to educate the world. I think there are these other motives that lead to the problem. We would have a better balance in our job market if we really focused on why are we recruiting the students and what we can do to both satisfy industry and make good career paths for our students."
He asks: "What really drives the size of our research groups? Does it have anything to do with what our students are going to do afterward, or are there other considerations? That, I think, is an issue that has to be faced squarely."
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