Best and brightest?

The technology industry, in lobbying Congress for expansion of programs to attract skilled foreign workers, has long claimed that foreign students graduating from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are typically “the best and the brightest,”…

The assertion that the foreign graduates offer superior skills or ability relative to U.S. graduates is found not to be supported by the data:

• On a variety of measures, the former foreign students have talent lesser than, or equal to, their American peers.
• Skilled-foreign-worker programs are causing an internal brain drain in the United States.

The study finds that the tech industry’s “genius” claims for these groups [of foreign workers] are not supported by the available data. Compared to Americans of the same education and age, the former foreign students turn out to be weaker than, or at most comparable to, the Americans in terms of salary, patent applications, Ph.D. dissertation awards, and quality of the doctoral program in which they studied.

source: epi.org; “Are foreign students the ‘best and brightest’? Data and implications for immigration policy”; Norman Matloff