I have been following the immigration reform debate, jobs and the American economy debate and educational reform debate and I have come to a conclusion....I'm mentally exhausted. I did notice that all three have a number of common threads that I would like to try to untangle here.
1. H1B Visa
The humble HIB Visa has been gaining some popularity over the last few years. Trend analysis on the every increasing cap for issued visas is a source of contention. One interpretation is that the year over year increase for the last decade is a clear indication of the shortage of technical skill sets in the American labor market. Another interpretation is that it is a mask for corporate welfare, that there is no shortage of qualified American candidates, just a shortage of companies willing to pay market rates for that labor. For those who don't know, HIB visas are temporary visas issued to foreign nationals to fill high need technical positions when a company can not find a qualified citizen applicant. Regardless of the hither and yond in this exchange the simple fact is that tech companies (Microsoft, Apple, Cisco etc.) have consistently demanded and consistently gotten H1B cap increases every year for the past five years running. I will come back to my assessment of this situation in a minute.
2. You Want Fries With That?
While the debate about visas and it's cousin the US labor market continue; jobs in this country still go unfilled. What could be the reason for this? Once you clear away the smoke and mirrors it boils down to two basic conditions; either there are not enough qualified applicants for a given job or the job is considers too "menial" for a large available labor pool. I personally think that both forces are acting at the same time. We have a native born citizen labor pool that is either over qualified or under qualified for a wide array of employment opportunities. Someone that has just spend $100K on a college degree does not want to flip burgers for a living. Someone that has an Associates degree in Information Technology does not have the credit hours or experience to be a Senior Software Engineer. So what do most employers in the country do? Hire immigrant labor either legal or illegal. What do I use to support this assertion. The news and actual practical experience. When Alabama enacted it's strict immigration law, the labor pool for the agricultural sector dried up over night. Farmer after farmer complained that they either couldn't find enough people to do the work or that the legal citizen were not willing or able to do the work. One farmer noted that half his replacement work force quite the first day after lunch noting that the work was "too hard". My practical experience comes from five years as an IT team manager. I have consistently had to resort to contract resources to fill programmer position because there register of candidates was either unfilled or did not have any qualified candidates. Approximately half my team is contract labor consisting of foreign nationals in the path to legal permanent residence or citizenship. And each one of those individuals came to me via H1B visas. What does this all have to do with education?
3. If It Ain't Broke......
The top ten jobs and most sought after skill sets did not exit twenty years ago. The United States is inextricably integrated into the global trade market importing 50% of it's consumer goods and export 30% of its produced goods. The United States has an 8.5% global trade deficit with China, South Korea, the EU and OPEC leading the way. The world is an economically, culturally and geo-politically very different place than is was twenty or thirty years ago. The US has ceded it's position as a technological, economic, educational and political world power. How did this happen? In my opinion (and the opinion of better minds than mine) the United States stood still while the rest of the world passed us. And at the core of this stagnation was and is an educational delivery system built for the 1950s and still run like it was the 1970s. What does this have to do with H1B and the US labor market? Everything! We have been using the same model to turn out the same quality and level of individual into a labor market that they have been less and less qualified for. We however have been very good at instilling vast amounts of confidence in the abilities of every student we release from this inadequate system. The result is that when asked how they did, US students rate themselves at or near the top of every category while empirical studies put them at no better than 20th. So we have greater numbers of "educated" individuals who can't fill ever more demanding skills sets but with an entitled sense of self-worth that precludes them from considering skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor positions.
What does this all mean? I believe that the rise in the need to import skilled labor is a direct result of a broken education delivery system. I believe this has adversely affect the US labor market with shortages in key areas and overages in other areas. I believe that if this country ever wants to reclaim a more realistic global leadership position (and not one in our own minds), we need to move to truly and deeply re-think how we deliver and measure knowledge transmission, retention and evaluation to produce a citizen more capable of competing in a national and global labor market.
And this transformation needs to start here and now. :)
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