Hillary Clinton in favor of fast track green cards for ‘STEM’ graduates

WASHINGTON (Diya TV) — Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said she wants the U.S. to “staple” green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who earn a master’s or Ph.D. in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — from accredited institutions.

Clinton outlined the idea during her speech on her proposed technology policy agenda on Tuesday.

Her agenda is heavy on improving computer science education and continues a trend introduced by President Obama, such as training 50,000 computer science teachers in the next 10 years. However, immigration is likely to become the topic that garners the most attention. Clinton’s “staple” idea isn’t the first time a Washington politician has made such a proposal — 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney shared the same idea, one of which that has received bipartisan support from the U.S. Congress.

Clinton’s proposal would allow foreign graduates on F-1 visa to bypass temporary H-1B work visas and move from student visas to green cards. The graduates will need to have jobs lined up in order to qualify.

Ron Hira, a public policy professor at Harvard University, said earlier this week that such a program “will create perverse incentives in both the labor and educational markets.” If implemented, employers, he said, “will be incentivized to replace their older incumbent workers with cheaper fresh graduates, fueling age discrimination.”

Additionally, if such a program was adopted, colleges would in turn begin recruiting foreign students into advanced degree programs with the ultimate promise of them obtaining green cards as incentive.

“Given that master’s [programs] are short in duration (as little as 12 months), and have little oversight from outside bodies (no specialized accreditation process for most), this provision will make it inexpensive for foreigners to purchase green cards from a variety of universities,” said Hira during Senate testimony delivered earlier this year.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has voiced mixed sentiments over the idea, during the GOP debate in Detroit last March, he seemed uncertain on how to handle international students who graduate from U.S. schools.

Foreign students will go to Harvard, Stanford and Wharton and “as soon as they’re finished they’ll get shoved out,” Trump said. “They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately, they’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brain power in this country.”

Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis and a longtime H-1B critic, said: “It is a shame that both Trump and Clinton have bought into the industry lobbyist line of a STEM labor shortage. There is no data evidence for that, and anyone can see wages have been flat, counter to the claim of a shortage.”