America's political leadership and the financial press have sold the slogan that "Americans must accept the painful loss of good jobs in exchange for the rewards of a global free-market." Most Americans are still awaiting the promised rewards, they know that world markets are not free, that America's middle class is disappearing, and that a college education no longer guarantees a brighter future for their children. Most Americans feel powerless to affect meaningful change because any dissent has been recast as an attempt at "protectionism" which would deprive "private" American companies of their "free-market" rights. That argument is an excellent red herring since it masks one of the central questions of the debate on globalization and the outsourcing of American jobs: Should Congress allow multi-national corporations to use American tax dollars to pay for their immigration and training of foreign workers at American universities?

Those who have worked toward a technical degree in any public university know that foreign-born professors and graduate students are in the majority in most engineering disciplines and on the increase in the hard sciences. This transformation of the faculty and graduate-student populations in public universities began in the 1980s when a temporary shortage of American PhDs in engineering and science led the National Science Foundation to recommend to Congress that they facilitate immigration of foreign-born graduate students and faculty.

In the 1990s technology companies in America wanted to increase the immigration of foreign workers to cut their labor costs. To achieve this, corporations needed to find a way around immigration laws, like the H1-B visa program, which were put in place to protect American workers by limiting the number of foreign workers that could enter America each year (Remember, the ancestors of current Americans carved this country out of a wilderness with no government aid like university stipends). The loophole had already been provided by Congress when they relaxed immigration requirements for university graduate students and faculties. Thus, through a politically insignificant adjustment in the law the number of foreign workers that corporations could bring into the US would be limited only by the number of graduate degrees which American universities could grant to foreign nationals in any given year.

The fact that colleges would benefit by increasing the size of their graduate programs was immediately obvious to university administrators, and a mutual accommodation with corporations was quickly put into place: In exchange for an ever-increasing number of American-trained foreign workers, corporations would use their well-funded lobbying organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce and Compete America to press Congress for increased funding for universities and their cohort agencies like the National Academy of Engineering. Because of this accommodation, Chief administrators at major public universities can now earn salaries of $500K a year. It is easy to see why the majority of faculty members and graduate students in technical departments are from countries where corporations outsource the majority of once-American jobs.

According to every credible study, there has been an excess of American-born engineers and scientists for at least a full decade, and among that group, the excess of individuals with graduate degrees is particularly large. Thus, the final component required to secure an unending supply of cheap foreign-born labor was a public relations campaign which claimed, in the face of the obvious glut, that there was a perennial shortage of American-born students capable of becoming scientists and engineers. It almost seems like a monumental achievement but, after all, advertising is what corporations do best, and the necessary campaign fit neatly into the false claim that our K-12 schools are failing in their mission and we are therefore incapable of producing men and women literate in math and the sciences, which is ludicrous. To see that America has met every engineering and scientific challenge that ever came her way, schools or not, one need look no further than the Wright brothers. Neither one had a high-school diploma (Anyone who knows history can look to the many great men and women of science to see that schools neither manufacture intelligence, nor do they drive success).