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(For new reader and those who request 好友请求, please read my 公告栏 first)
Thomas Friedman is one of the most respected columnist for ther New York Times.
His observations on the US and on the world has turned into at least two best sellers
(.e.g. "The World is Flat"2004 which I think has been translated into Chinese).
Today 5/23/07 he has a column which my Chinesesciencenet readers should read.
Since NYTimes is not always avaliable through the www in China and the fact his column
is avaliable only via subscription, I took the liberty of reproducing his column below :
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Laughing and Crying
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 23, 2007
First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.
I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, one of America's great science and engineering schools,
so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their
diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one
the announcer read their names and each was handed their
doctorate — in biotechnology, computing, physics and
engineering — by the school's president, Shirley Ann Jackson.
The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of
the newly minted Ph.D.'s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a
moment, as the foreign names kept coming — "Hong Lu, Xu Xie,
Tao Yuan, Fu Tang" — I thought that the entire class of doctoral
students in physics were going to be Chinese, until "Paul Shane
Morrow" saved the day. It was such a caricature of what
President Jackson herself calls "the quiet crisis" in high-end
science education in this country that you could only laugh.
Don't get me wrong. I'm proud that our country continues to
build universities and a culture of learning that attract the
world's best minds. My complaint — why I also wanted to cry —
was that there wasn't someone from the Immigration and
Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson
stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-
born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do
their research and innovation here. If we can't educate enough of
our own kids to compete at this level, we'd better make sure we
can import someone else's, otherwise we will not maintain our
standard of living.
It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as
wide as possible — to attract and keep the world's first-round
intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly
has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is
human talent. I'm serious. I think any foreign student who gets a
Ph.D. in our country — in any subject — should be offered
citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it
difficult for them to stay is crazy.
Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is
pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas
available to companies that want to bring in skilled foreign
workers and the number of employment-based green cards given
to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all
they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because
we're not training enough engineers, but they will, over time,
start many more companies and create many more good jobs
than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of
that — and where innovation happens matters. It's still where the
best jobs will be located.
Folks, we can't keep being stupid about these things. You can't
have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science
graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can
now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to
start companies — without it eventually impacting our standard
of living — especially when we're also slipping behind in high-
speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from
fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.
My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of
the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an
issue in the presidential campaign by creating a movement to
demand that candidates focus on our digital deficits and divides.
(See: http://www.techpresident.com.) Mr. Rasiej, who
unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in 2005
on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere,
notes that "only half of America has broadband access to the
Internet." We need to go from "No Child Left Behind," he says, to
"Every Child Connected."
Here's the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked
up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to
discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and
competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian
Magazine and author of the upcoming book "The First
Campaign," which deals with this theme. So right now, it's
mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but
there is only so much they can do without Washington being
focused and leading.
Which is why we've got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end
in the quickest, least bad way possible — otherwise we are going
to lose Iraq and America. It's coming down to that choice.
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