Your friendly neighborhood college graduate.

Have you noticed that there is an increasing number of immigrant physicians and scientists? While we are complaining about poor immigrants or aliens coming in and taking jobs that we believe that the perpetually unemployed would take, aliens and immigrants come in and take highly coveted , well paid positions. People tell us there is a shortage of highly trained US workers to fill these positions. Why?

Part of it is that we make it difficult for middle income Americans to get a good graduate education. If you have been in many of the Universities around the country of late you have seen innumerable international students filling graduate assistant and research assistant positions. Why? Are they just that much better qualified than US citizen students? No. It often boils down to one thing. If they have a job in the university they pay resident tuition or even no tuition at all. The same goes for scholarships. Many colleges give students with as little as $500.00 per semester in scholarships resident status. I have even heard that if students live in on-campus residences they may also get resident tuition. Why can't these positions go to deserving US Students?

There is, in part an idea that an international student going home to help modernize his third-world country makes the whole world a better place. The problem is that many of them will never leave the US (see need for highly trained workers above). Even those that leave mostly go to countries that are far behind the US, but at the same time not poor countries nearing starvation (China and India particularly.) The bottom line is we subsidize international students education as much as we do those of US students and either they remain here and take US jobs or they return to economies that are competing against ours.

What happened to international students being a huge revenue stream? Even in private universities there is enough public financing to make it an issue of import to quit allowing this drain on our resources.

The bottom line is that IF we educated more Americans that we wouldn't need to allow untold migrant workers to take on significantly profitable jobs that native born Americans could and should be doing.