Politicians Need To Get Serious About Retaining Foreign Graduates
During a podcast appearance last week, former President Donald Trump made an uncharacteristic argument. “What I will do, is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he said, adding that he would even include graduates of junior colleges.
A Trump campaign spokesperson quickly tempered that proposal, promising an “aggressive vetting process” that would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges.” The green card offer would only apply to college graduates “who would never undercut American wages or workers,” the spokesperson continued. (It’s important to couch Trump’s initial statement even further: As The Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell has pointed out, the Trump administration “implemented policies that further restricted skilled legal immigration and made the lives of these international workers and students a living hell.”)
But the back-and-forth—and the pushback Trump’s remarks received—shouldn’t deter politicians from treating foreign graduate retention as a weakness that the U.S. needs to address.
“The U.S. spends resources training hundreds of thousands of international students every year, but only provides opportunities for a fraction of them to stay after graduation,” says Connor O’Brien, a research and policy analyst at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization. “This is an incredible gift to China and other competitors, who have their best and brightest educated in America and then forced back home by our backward immigration system.”
An EIG analysis released yesterday found that only four in 10 international graduates of U.S. universities end up staying in the country long-term, according to data from the National Survey of College Graduates. Three-quarters of Ph.D. recipients stay, while half of master’s degree recipients and just 17 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients do. Some may be leaving simply because their best employment prospects are in their home countries or elsewhere. Still, a key factor is that “a growing population of international students is competing for a fixed number of opportunities to stay,” the EIG analysis notes.
“Unless we expand skilled visa programs like the H-1B,
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