China dominates our STEM graduate schools – a good way to steal American technology?

If you want to ruin America:

• Fill the nation to the brim with redundant flocks of lawyers, pencil-pushers, and political toads.
• Discourage your citizens from pursuing engineering graduate degrees.
• Encourage  your universities to favor communist students, instead of Americans.
• Allow your largest tech companies to hire their engineers from Communist regimes, who were educated here, but whose loyalties are suspect.

While President Donald Trump attempted to reform our visa worker programs four years ago, the “swamp” managed to thwart most plans to prioritize American workers and students over foreigners. This instantly made him the enemy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth and the Business Round Table, who spent the next four years lobbying against him on everything but cutting taxes and appointing judges.

The new administration has managed to undue most of Trump’s minimal safeguards for American students and workers, and Biden wants legislation to allow nearly unlimited, imported foreign takeover of strategic jobs and access to advanced STEM degrees.

Nobody is happier with this new direction than Global Times, official voice and propaganda organ of the Chinese Communist Party. Just 11 days after the November 2020 election, as results here were being announced, the Communists were looking forward to our new leader with hope.

Enrollment from China provide critical income to American universities, since 75 to 80 percent of full time graduate students in key technology fields at U.S. universities are international students, the Times reported.

The communist government news outlet said “students who deferred their offers from US universities due to the pandemic, have been hoping to attend classes in the US by next year, since the US presidential election.”

“I am placing all my hopes for studying in the US next year on Biden,” said May, a student who asked her full name not be used. “Maybe Biden will resume Obama’s policy? He seems to embrace openness,” she said.

The Times said “Obama’s former vice president’s election promise included friendlier policies toward international students and working visa applicants.” During the Obama administration, validity of student F visas was extended from one to five years.

Trump set a number of barriers for international students, especially Chinese, with Forbes reporting that 29 percent of working visa applications were turned down in 2020, compared to only 6 percent in 2015.

The Times interviewed a Chinese student in America named Wang. He is a recent PhD graduate in computer science, and is working for a gaming company in California under OPT (Optional Practical Training).

That training allows students with F-1 status to work in the US for 12 to 36 months. Wang closely followed the election, but has only limited enthusiasm over Biden, compared with his American colleagues.

“I am still uncertain about applying for H1B three years later when my OPT expires, although I know getting one would be easier,” he said, explaining that “dropping international graduates (due to current pandemic and visa barriers) and low employment rate amid economic plight mean fewer applicants.”

The Global Times had predicted that Biden “would increase investment in higher education and bring international students back to American campuses.”

American universities care about foreign students, especially the more than 300,000 from China, who account for one third of international students in the US., the Times said.

They constitute a diverse and dynamic community and many of these students are pursuing degrees at their own expense, and are cash cows for the US schools, the Times noted.

Cash cows, indeed! Universities travel to China to recruit, and ignore American students for engineering grad slots. Their stance: why go local when the foreign student pays twice as much!

Every American grad school student means one less high-paying Chinese applicant. Universities don’t seem to care that many – or most – are loyal communists, possibly sending our technocracy back to China, along with the latest advances used by American industry and the tech monopolies?

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The Global Times and similar outlets in this country are a far cry from real reporting and editing.

In the 60s I worked part-time as Philadelphia correspondent for the United States Information Agency (USIA). Much of that writing portrayed positive news about how great our country had become through interviews with foreign visitors.

Those reports were reprinted in foreign newspapers and magazines to promote the image of the U.S., not to deprecate any individual or take swipes at foreign ideas and customs.

The following quote by the Global Times shows the sinister side of propaganda and even sounds like some of our swamp-dwelling commentators on cable news today:

Chinese students and new graduates shared some moments that bit by bit drive them away from the US, such as loneliness and insecurity when they are shouted at with racist words, fear of shifting US policy (like a sudden ban on We Chat), or the smell of marijuana on the way to school.

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Meanwhile, our nation has about a half million engineers, many just designing thinner soda containers and lighter plastic forks for the corporate class, while China boasts nine time as many – 4.5 million engineers – leading the world in manufacturing, thanks to robots and the newest,  most computerized factories anywhere.

We may be far behind in engineers, but boy, oh boy, do we beat them with lawyers.

China’s 1.3 billion citizens get by with about 500,000 of the legal pocket-pickers and paperwork pontiffs, while the U.S. suffers from 1.4 million for 330,000,000 residents. That equals one shark for 236 Americans, and one shark for every 2,600 Chinese.

Who is the superpower: the country with ten times as many lawyers per capita, or the one with nine times as many engineers?