Video and Transcript Now Available: "Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?" Panel Discussion

WASHINGTON, May 27, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Video and transcript are now available from the Center for Immigration Studies panel discussion at the National Press Club, "Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?" Two of the nation's leading experts on STEM employment, Michael Teitelbaum and B. Lindsay Lowell, joined the Center's Director of Research and author of the report to discuss the admissions of foreign STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics – workers, examining workforce size and wage trends.

The Center's newly published report and panelists found no evidence of a STEM worker shortage, concurring with research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the RAND Corporation, the Urban Institute, and the National Research Council. The country has well over twice as many people with STEM degrees as there are actual STEM jobs. "It's just been taken for granted that there is a shortage of scientists and engineers," commented Michael Teitelbaum, Senior Research Associate, Harvard Law School.

View the report, transcript, and video at:  http://cis.org/Announcements/STEM-Panel-052014

"Of the 700,000 immigration STEM workers the data show entered between 2007 and 2012, only one-third – very similar to that figure for natives overall – actually got a STEM job," said Dr. Steven Camarota, the Center's Director of Research and the report's author. "About one-third got a job outside of STEM and actually about one-third aren't working at all. The fact that so many recent immigrants with STEM degrees did not find STEM jobs is a clear indication that certainly immigration is a very inefficient tool for adding to the STEM workforce."

Overwhelming evidence of a strong U.S. supply of STEM workers exists. Future legislation pertaining to visas for such workers from abroad should be based on this research and not merely on employers' desire for a cheap, abundant supply of cheap labor.

**Panel Participants:

Michael Teitelbaum, Ph.D.: Senior Research Associate, Harvard Law School; Former Vice President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Vice Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform headed by the late Barbara Jordan; author of the new book, Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust & the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton University Press)

B. Lindsay Lowell, Ph.D.: Director of Policy Studies, Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University; Director of Research, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform headed by the late Barbara Jordan; labor analyst at the U.S. Department of Labor; co-author of the widely cited "Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market", published by the Economic Policy Institute

Steven Camarota, Ph.D.: Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies, and author of the new report, "Is There a STEM Worker Shortage?"

Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.

Contact: Marguerite Telford
[email protected], 202-466-8185

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120806/MM52838LOGO

SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies

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