In all of the money and outreach trying to convince more Americans to become scientists, what is most often left out is we train lots of scientists that we then force to return home, where they become competitors to America.

The origin of the student visa versus work visa problem we now face was a cultural mythology that was created, stating that companies would somehow pay foreign STEM graduates less, in defiance of state laws, federal laws, and ethics, unless they were forced to hire U.S. citizens. Because of that, union lobbyists got the American work visa process tightened up, in the belief that it would force American companies to hire people born in the US. Instead, businesses followed the work force back to Asia.

Most American-educated PhDs want to stay and those that never intended to stay leave on pace. Where the numbers diverge are with PhDs who are not allowed to stay because of arcane laws for work visas. 

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) report
reveals that 96.4 percent of U.S. PhDs who were citizens in the academic years 2001-09 intended to stay in the United States and by 2010, 96.2 percent of them were.

Among foreign students, 76.4 percent wanted to stay in the United States after their PhDs but by 2010, only 68.5 percent had been allowed to remain. Companies are limited in how many foreign citizens they can hire and the process is expensive. The result is that America loses cultural diversity and highly-educated white-collar members of society who would then become citizens.

The data presented in this report are important for policymakers and researchers who say they are interested in understanding the factors influencing the employment decisions of doctoral degree holders. Since the 1990s, the National Science Foundation and other governmental agencies have spent $5 billion trying to convince more Americans to become engineers, when if we simply turned more engineers into Americans, the employment crisis in private sector STEM companies would disappear.