The Downside of Having More Engineers

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by gwilliam

The rest of the world is supplying many of the engineers who do work for US companies, either through outsourcing (work done for American companies in other countries, both manufacturing and engineering), H1B visas (issued to foreign-educated engineers with "special skills" supposedly unavailable in the US, usually because the offered salary is far below US market salaries) and all the students who come to American graduate schools from other countries.

(My emphasis added)
I really can't let the scare quotes and accusation of the highlighted statement go without comment.

In my professional life I'm a Research Engineering Manager at a moderately large high tech company, and over the past several years I have been involved in hiring for ~40 mostly PhD-level positions. Almost all of these hires have been non-US born engineers and computer scientists. For recent graduates we usually have to use the H1B visa. We do require special skills and pay a premium for them, but there are simply very few qualified US candidates out there.

The data supports my anecdotal evidence. Over the past two decades, approximately two thirds of all engineering PhDs awarded by US graduate schools were earned by foreign-born students (Table 11, Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2007). A larger percentage of US PhDs stay in academia, add in PhDs earned in European graduate schools so my experience of >80% foreign-born candidates is as expected.