Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate, co-founded the MIT Media Lab. He was its Director when I showed up in Washington in 1986. He was a formidable figure in the rapidly developing world of digital communications and services.
I showed up to become the Director of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) which was an agency in the Commerce Department. I was coming from a legal, political and small business background in fly-over country.
As a Newbie I enjoyed being able to say “start from the beginning”. I brought few preconceived notions into those early conversations. But, as a state university educated lawyer I found MIT’s media lab almost disorienting. What I encountered were a lot of bright young people in research and development mode. Their most important work was trying and being instructed by success or failure. As a law student my practice format had been the courts.
A visual change for me was the composition of MIT’s student body as reflected in the make up of the media lab. I would say that a good 2/3rds of the students I saw in the lab had Asian backgrounds. And that brings me around to today’s immigration debate.
At its simplest the new Republican Party is convulsed by the large number of commentators and agitators representing a no new immigrants point of view. Their quite dubious assumption is that foreigners are taking American jobs. Forgetting that businesses create jobs.
The target of controversy are H-1B visas. H-1B visas are granted to “highly educated foreign professionals to work in speciality occupations.”
There is a vocal contingent led by Elon Musk that believe H-1B visas are a valuable enabler helping US companies recruit smart and disciplined engineering talent that comes from overseas. Musk and his peers belief is that American education and culture dull a native born version of a cohort that might aspire to this profile. At least in theory President-Elect Trump appears to agree with them.
Without weighing in on the stuff of American youth I know that becoming an accomplished engineer is hard work. When I hired a person to be the technology lead at Hearst New Media the applicants were mostly foreign born. I hired an Indian-American.
To me it is inconceivable that we should not encourage top engineering talent to work in America. The head of America’s fastest growing company over recent years is Taiwanese-American. He is Jensen Huang. The company, Nvidia. To one degree or another we are all hyphenated.
By contrast the only CEOs of Apple, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, were both native born. Nvidia and Apple are the world’s most valuable companies. Their leaders derived from different points of beginning but all three were/are imaginative, smart, obsessed and very successful. America should hope that those characteristics are readily available regardless of where they were born or their ethnicity.
At this writing it appears that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK) will have a major role in health care policy in the Trump Administration. I would prefer a person whose background is in artificial intelligence (AI). American or foreign born. When it comes to questions about the efficacy of vaccines or a whole range of technical issues I would rather we be led by somebody who puts the rigors of research ahead of intuition and bias.
In recent years America’s lawmakers, public policy advocates and business leaders have debated employment criteria. Merit should be at the beginning and end of job searches. Presumably we, the taxpayers and stockholders, want a good job done. How can it be otherwise?
Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.
Reed Fawell 3 says
“When it comes to questions about the efficacy of vaccines or a whole range of technical issues I would rather we be led by somebody who puts the rigors of research ahead of intuition and bias.”
You mean you want us led by the self proclaimed Mr. Science himself, Dr. Fauci, and his discredited regime? After all the damage done to us over the past 4 years. Is not Fauci, Mr. Bureaucracy himself?
No, instead of Fauci, we hire Mr. and Mrs. “intuition and truth seeker”, the mothers and fathers of most all creative acts, scientific, cultural and faith wise breakthroughs, uncovered during flashes of brilliance found in rigorous and honest experience seeking only real truths and action however inconvenient, while tossing out masses of all other stuff, most all irrelevant crap, to find true, beauty, and good. What a difference then a day will make.
So,
To the horror of so many around here, there is arising suddenly a Phoenix out of ashes and gaseous swamp, all to the great surprise of the Bubble Dwellers who until now have been in charge of our todays age of rampant incompetence, gross and pervasive, and frightening, thanks largely to their progressive regimes and ideologies that have now throttled our nation’s merit and brilliance to its tipping point into oblivion. Let us confine the collapse to their corrupt regimes, so then our nation yet again will thrive.
Kent Robertson says
We need comprehensive immigration reform. That is Congress’ job and they just won’t do it, just like so many other responsibilities they shirk. I am a firm believer that Congressional Term Limits would go a long way toward solving many of these problems.
As for RFK Jr…He speaks from a perspective of seeing the health of our citizens (and the world) failing miserably. He sees the chronological associations of autism, and obesity, and so many other ills with the corruption of our diets and with the almost meteoric rise in childhood (and adult) vaccines. He notes that the kinds of studies done 40 years ago are lacking, and is calling for comprehensive testing to understand what is happening to our health. The big pharmaceutical and food industries don’t want these studies done. They are making hundreds of billions of dollars with the status quo.
There’s no reason why JFK Jr can’t use AI experts as an adjunct to what he is trying to do. I’m sure he will do just that.
Kent Robertson, MD, Retired
Reed Fawell 3 says
Yes, I agree. And, as a closely related matter, it is also my sense that America’s health care system fatal flaw is that it is not designed to prevent or effectively treat the illnesses that now pose the greatest threats the health our people. Indeed America’s brand new health care system is already grossly obsolete and ineffective for an ever growing share of the American people while at the same time it is wildly expensive, with enormous waste, while remarkable driving many of the best doctors out of the system. Yet, another US government program boondoggle.
Willard Tod Engelskirchen says
For openers I spent 35 years in industrial research. The last 30 of which were with a company where I retired as Technical Director. There are many reasons why so many in R&D and engineering are foreign born. Just after I retired I calculated that 60% of senior research management was foreign born. We tried to recruit the best and that is where we ended up. Here are a couple of reasons why:
Meritocracy: India has the Indian Institute of Technology which trains students who often end up attending grad school here. Many of my successful co-workers came thru this system and ended up with PhDs from very good schools like Cornell and the University of Texas. These people are smart and work very hard. Admission to the IIT is based on exam scores.
False Goals: Too many of our young students want to go straight to the C suite floor. Their thinking is that the work is easier and the educational requirements are easier.
Lack of role models: The TV and movie based world young people see has few examples of lab or design team work groups to use as examples.
Slots in Grad School go to foreign students: They want the assignments. They are competent and well trained. They will do the job of a grad student for lower compensation. (Yes – in STEM fields students are compensated.) At one point I was told that 70% of grad school slots in STEM fields went to foreign students who pay full tuition. (Yes some are compensated).
This is all very complex. Few of us consider all the complications.
BTW, I view someone who thinks of Dr. Fauci as discredited with suspicion.