Thread: Startup Act 2.0: House lawmakers introduce Senators’ immigration reform bill

Startup Act 2.0: House lawmakers introduce Senators’ immigration reform bill

“Now is the time to act — not after the election, not next year,” Senators Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in a joint statement on Wednesday. “Other countries are not taking this year off. Neither should we. These are bipartisan ideas with bicameral support — it’s time for Washington to come together to pass Startup Act 2.0, strengthen the economy, and create jobs.”

By J.D. Harrison, Published: June 5 | Updated: Wednesday, June 6, 9:50 AM

One week after Senators from both sides of the aisle unveiled a new immigration reform and job creation measure, Republicans and Democrats have again linked up to introduce the same bill in the House.

Startup Act 2.0 would allow immigrants who obtain graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and math to stay and work in the country; reform made necessary, proponents say, by demand for those degrees that is outpacing the supply of graduates from American universities. The bill would also create a new category of visa for immigrants who start companies and hire workers in the United States.

Republicans Michael Grimm (N.Y.), Kevin Yoder (Kan.), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Robert Dold (Ill.) teamed with Democrats Loretta Sanchez (Calif.), Russ Carnahan (Mo.) and Jared Polis (Colo.) to bring the bill into the House on Wednesday. A bipartisan group of lawmakers already introduced the measure in the Senate.
“US immigration policy should help, not hurt, the ability of US companies to attract top talent,” Sanchez said in a statement. “As our economy continues to recover, we must further enable our entrepreneurs to grow and to create jobs.”

A similar bill failed earlier this year amid concerns that such reform would allow foreign-born graduates to flood the job market and exacerbate the country’s unemployment woes.

However, on the other side of debate, immigration reform advocates point to new research showing that American universities are not churning out nearly enough STEM graduates to meet the demand of American businesses. Currently, the number of job openings requiring those degrees is increasing at three times the rate of the rest of the job market, yet science and math departments are still struggling to attract new college majors, according to the National Science Foundation.

But not when it comes to foreign-born graduate students, 60 percent of whom were studying science and engineering in 2010. However, under the current laws, many of them will likely be forced to return to their home countries after graduation.

“Too often we educate the world’s best and brightest in STEM fields, only to send them back to countries like India and China to open businesses and compete against us,” Grimm said. “This bill will keep top talent here in the U.S. to open businesses that hire Americans, and drive U.S. innovation and competitiveness.”

Startup Act 2.0’s other provisions would make certain investments in young companies permanently exempt from capital gains taxes and create a research and development tax credit for firms less than five years old that bring in less than $5 million in annual revenue.

The proposal comes at a time when bipartisan collaboration has become especially rare on the Hill; however, the bill’s Senate sponsors pointed to the recent passage of the JOBS Act as evidence that Congress can still rally around this type of legislation during an election year.

“Now is the time to act — not after the election, not next year,” Senators Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in a joint statement on Wednesday. “Other countries are not taking this year off. Neither should we. These are bipartisan ideas with bicameral support — it’s time for Washington to come together to pass Startup Act 2.0, strengthen the economy, and create jobs.”


source: Startup Act 2.0: House lawmakers introduce Senators’ immigration reform bill - The Washington Post

However, on the other side of debate, immigration reform advocates point to new research showing that American universities are not churning out nearly enough STEM graduates to meet the demand of American businesses. Currently, the number of job openings requiring those degrees is increasing at three times the rate of the rest of the job market, yet science and math departments are still struggling to attract new college majors, according to the National Science Foundation.

Then focus on what is going wrong for American families and American students instead of importing more students and labor from abroad to displace and replace the students we have.

Our universities are not producing enough good graduates because the American governmental system has been compromised to the point that the focus is on promoting and elevating non US Citizens instead of Americans!

W

I am not surprised that the Democrats are "on board" for this one. I think it could have unintended consequences, or perhaps the consequences have already been considered.

I think we should all be very cautious of Mr. Rubio and this legislation that has the potential to actually be discriminatory to some students in the US.

The questions should be; Are Universities giving preference to foreign born students for increased profits because they pay full tuition and minority students through Affirmative Action?

Shady Agents Help Chinese Students Enter US Universities
Posted Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

A record number of Chinese are now studying at U.S. universities. But admissions experts say many of those students are turning to dishonest admissions agents to help fake their application materials.

Phillip Ballinger, who chairs a committee formed by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, says “many, if not the majority” of Chinese students applying for U.S. colleges employ agents to help navigate the complicated application process.

But, he told VOA, the agents often go beyond acting as traditional admissions counselors — sometimes filling out applications and writing essays in flawless English, and even changing high school grades.

“Frequently that means that they actually do their applications. They write their essays, they in some cases even create their transcripts and….the only exceptions often are the test scores we receive.”

Ballinger says in some cases, the students or families pay admissions agents steep fees. In other cases, he says U.S. universities actually encourage the behavior by paying the agents a commission for each student placed.

Chinese enrollment at U.S. universities has increased dramatically in recent years as China's economy has improved and parents have become able to afford to send their children to America's coveted universities.

Observers say that many cash-strapped universities are willing to look the other way since most foreign students pay full tuition for their education. Many U.S. students receive scholarships or other forms of assistance.

Ballinger is the assistant vice president for enrollment at the University of Washington in Seattle. He said such behavior ultimately lowers the quality of education for all those involved.

He said the practice is also common in India and South Korea.

“It concerns us greatly, because that makes the student an 'economic object,' as opposed to a student you wished could be well-placed in a university or learn more about a university so that when he or she enrolls at that university they'll be successful and have a good experience.”

A recent report by the Institute of International Education found that nearly 158,000 Chinese students studied in the U.S. in the last academic year, making it the largest contributor of international students. Twenty-two percent of international students in the U.S. are from China.

Shady Agents Help Chinese Students Enter US Universities « VOA Breaking News

Colorado universities recruiting more foreign students

11/21/2011 02:10:56 AM MST

The Denver Post

Colorado universities, now free to recruit more international students because of a change in state law, are beginning to aggressively court foreigners looking to study in the United States.

Colorado State University is considering hiring an outside agency to recruit more international students.

It is a controversial tactic that some higher-education experts say is unethical and could mean more competition to get into the University of Colorado.

CU admissions officials have begun sending counselors abroad to countries and regions that have well-known feeder schools to the Boulder campus, including China and the Middle East.

But hiring outside agents is something that CU might consider in the future as the school works to internationalize its campus and backfill budget cuts with more expensive non-resident tuition payments.

A package of legislation signed into Colorado law last year loosens the state's reins on public universities and allows them to recruit more international students.

State laws previously required Colorado universities to limit the number of nonresident students to one- third of their student populations.

The law now excludes international students, previously tallied as nonresidents, from that cap.

Read more: Colorado universities recruiting more foreign students - The Denver Post Colorado universities recruiting more foreign students - The Denver Post

From England - the new trend in Globalism

Universities recruit more foreigners as places for British students plummet

Universities are placing a new emphasis on recruiting students from overseas as the number of British youngsters who will miss out on places is poised to reach record levels.

Universities may be increasingly turning to the overseas market – where students can pay tens of thousands of pounds for a place – to make up expected budget shortfalls in the 2011-12 academic year before the controversial new £9,000-a-year tuition fees come into force in September 2012.

Rest of the Article is at:
Universities recruit more foreigners as places for British students plummet - Telegraph

Supreme Court will hear case on affirmative action at colleges
February 21, 2012|By David G. Savage | Washington

The Supreme Court cast doubt Tuesday on the future of affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, agreeing to hear an appeal from a white student in Texas who seeks an end to "racial preferences" in college admissions.
The decision could either limit the use of affirmative action or broadly forbid using race as an admissions factor.


However, because the court’s calendar is filled through the spring, the court will not hear arguments in the case until October, weeks before the presidential election.

The Obama administration could choose to weigh in on the issue, but it need not do so. The court’s intervention nonetheless is an ominous sign for defenders of affirmative action. Justice Elena Kagan also announced she will not take part in the decision.

Read the rest of the article at:
Supreme Court: Will hear affirmative action case - Los Angeles Times

November 30, 2009 4:00 A.M.
Racial Preferences by the Numbers
Two researchers lay out the data on affirmative action in college admissions.By Robert VerBruggen

It’s hard to get a straight answer as to how pervasive racial preferences are. On the one hand, many academics say preferences hardly even exist — they’re just a tie-breaker that admissions officers use on rare occasions. On the other hand, the same academics often say preferences are crucial to diversity, and their elimination would wreak havoc on campuses nationwide. Perhaps nowhere has this bizarre contradiction been on starker display than in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal — a book that manages, despite this contradiction, to shed light on various controversies in higher ed.

THE EXTENT OF PREFERENCES

Using the National Study of College Experience (NSCE) — a collection of information from eight anonymous elite colleges — authors Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford are able to calculate various applicants’ odds of getting into a school. They discover some mildly interesting trends regarding social class (more on that later), but their results for race are truly stunning. After academic performance and demographic factors have been taken into account, black applicants are more than five times as likely as whites to be accepted at NSCE private schools, and 220 times as likely to be accepted at NSCE public schools. Asian applicants, meanwhile, are only about a third as likely as whites to get big envelopes from private institutions, and one-fifth as likely to gain admission to public ones.

Putting preferences in terms of test scores, at private schools, blacks get an advantage, compared to whites, worth 310 SAT points (out of 1600), Hispanics an advantage of 130, and Asians a disadvantage of 140. At public schools, the authors present the difference in ACT points: blacks 3.8 (out of 36), Hispanics 0.3, Asians –3.4.If we look at students who actually matriculate, blacks are far more likely than whites to come from the bottom 80 percent of their high-school classes (27 percent versus 12 percent), have high-school GPAs of B+ or below (32 versus 18 percent), and have SAT scores below 1000 (21 versus 2 percent).

The logical conclusion from this mountain of evidence is obvious: Top-of-the-line schools use severe racial preferences. This shouldn’t be all that shocking; although colleges usually keep quiet about the degree to which they prefer blacks and Hispanics over Asians and whites, anecdotes and numbers have been trickling out for years. Even when California banned racial preferences, its state universities didn’t stop using them. Last year, a UCLA professor resigned from the school’s admissions committee in protest of its flouting the law and issued an 89-page report explaining his reasons. Few schools outright deny using preferences, and the Supreme Court allows the practice. The Center for Equal Opportunity has calculated the extent of countless schools’ preference policies, usually concluding that black and Hispanic candidates get a significant advantage.

But the authors resist this conclusion. Espenshade told an interviewer for the Inside Higher Ed website that he doesn’t have “smoking gun” evidence that Asians are discriminated against, claiming that factors he wasn’t able to include in his analysis — letters of recommendation, etc. — might have been so much worse for Asians that they explained the gap. The book makes a similar argument about blacks and Hispanics, going so far as to bust out the old tie-breaker meme in this jawdroppingly absurd passage:

It would be a mistake to interpret the data . . . as meaning that elite college admissions officers are necessarily giving extra weight to black and Hispanic candidates just because they belong to underrepresented minority groups. This may occur from time to time, especially in situations where two applicants are otherwise equally well qualified. But in our judgment, it is more likely that a proper assessment of these data is that the labels “black” and “Hispanic” are proxies for a constellation of other factors in a candidate’s application folder that we do not observe. These unobserved qualities — perhaps having overcome disadvantage and limited opportunities or experiencing challenging family or schooling circumstances — may be positively correlated with the chances of being admitted when a holistic review of an applicant’s total materials is conducted.

Racial Preferences by the Numbers - Robert VerBruggen - National Review Online