Thursday, May 17, 2012
Senate Colloquy: Senators Coons, Alexander discuss new bill to keep foreign-born U.S. grad students here to create jobs
As delivered on May 17, 2012
Senator Coons: Thank you so much, Senator Alexander. I can't think, Mr. President, of a better person to partner with, to seek advice, guidance, and leadership from on the issue of stem education and immigration reform than Senator Alexander, a national leader on education policy. Like me, Senator Alexander is the son of a former classroom teacher, but he also served as the U.S. Secretary of Education and president of a prominent university, University of Tennessee.
So he knows firsthand the challenges of the opportunity lost when tens of thousands of foreign nationals who come here and seek the opportunity to get STEM masters and doctoral degrees in some of our strongest and best universities, are then forced to return home to their nations of origin rather than being able to stay here if they choose, to create jobs, to grow businesses and to contribute to our country and our economy.
And as someone who before running for public office worked with a highly innovative materials-based science company that employed over 1,000 researchers, I too have a sense of what a great contribution immigrants have always made to this country, but particularly in these areas of innovation and how they can contribute to our competitiveness.
Senator Alexander's closing comment about the America COMPETES Act is where we started this conversation. I came to this Senate knowing that my predecessor from Delaware, Senator Kaufman, had been a strong supporter of the America COMPETES Act. One of the few engineers to serve in the modern Senate and I was happy to take up the cause and to press for its reauthorization in the waning days of the 111th Congress.
I met with Senator Alexander last year and we talked about this as one of the most promising unfinished pieces of business in that critical report, Rising Above The Gathering Storm and in that vital piece of legislation, the America COMPETES Act.
As Senator Alexander referenced, the America COMPETES Act was passed with strong bipartisan support. It was the sort of thing that was focused on moving America forward by identifying strong ideas that had support across the whole country and a lot of different sectors and from both parties. And it's my hope that this is the beginning of building a strong bipartisan coalition on moving forward on immigration reform.
Let me talk for a minute, if I could, Mr. President, about our history and tradition of immigrants contributing to our country being a strong part of job creation and growth here, and in particular immigrants who come to this country to be educated in STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering and math.
If you think about it for most of the last century we had some of the strongest universities in the world. For much of the last 50 years, anyone who came here from a foreign land to get a doctorate in a STEM discipline, if they chose to go home, they were going home to a country that really wasn't a competitive environment. The United States, because of our advantages and workforce and infrastructure and our legal system, our entrepreneurial culture, our capital markets, we were the world leaders in all sorts of technology, innovation and competitiveness. That's no longer the case. We still have the strongest universities in the world - 35 out of top 50 – but today those 17,000 STEM doctoral and masters graduates Senator Alexander referred to, when we force them to go home to their country of origin rather than allowing them to compete for those jobs here and contribute to the American economy, they're finding open arms.
So nations like India and China, who are vigorous competitors in the global economy, they're providing the capital markets, the infrastructure and the workforce, the resources to take advantage of those opportunities. We need an immigration system that responds to the modern economy and the opportunities of a highly competitive modern world. Rather than hemorrhaging these highly skilled folks and having them return home, we should give them the opportunity to participate in being job creators here.
The numbers bear this out, Mr. President. If you take a look at the Fortune 500 companies, today more than 40% of them were founded by immigrants or their children. Folks who have come to this country, recently, from other parts of the world have established companies that employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues of more than $4 trillion, a figure greater than the G.D.P. of every country in the world except for the U.S., China and Japan. Immigrant-founded start-up companies created 450,000 jobs in the United States in the last decade and generated more than $50 billion in sales.
Let me give you one example that's meant a lot to me: I've become friends, recently, with the C.E.O. of Bloom Energy. His name is KR Sridhar. In his native India, he got his undergraduate degree. He came to the United States to get his doctorate in mechanical engineering and went on to be a researcher at NASA's Ames Center and made a critical invention in solid oxide fuel cells.
He runs a company, Bloom Energy, that has already created a thousand jobs. Just last week, the Governor of Delaware and my senior Senator Tom Carper, and I joined many others at the site of a shuttered former Chrysler plant for the groundbreaking of a new manufacturing facility that Bloom Energy will make possible.
Why would we want a capable, bright contributor to our economy like KR to be forced to go home to his country of India, rather than welcoming him here and giving him the chance to participate, contribute and potentially become not just an American business leader but American citizen?
So we need to make it easier for the next generation of inventors and innovators to create jobs here. This bill, as Senator Alexander has laid out, is relatively simple. It creates a new class of visas for foreign students to pursue STEM masters and doctoral degree programs and allows us to continue a conversation about how do we recognize the long-standing central contribution to our economy, or culture and our country of immigrants.
I believe there's other areas of immigration reform that have to be on the table that we have to move forward on. I am eager to move forward on family-focused reform and other areas, as well where I'm a cosponsor of other immigration bills.
But my hope is that this legislation will get the attention it deserves, will get the broad support from members of both sides of the aisle that it deserves and that it will form part of a compromise that will address the needs of all the stakeholders in immigration reform in a responsible and balanced manner.
This legislation is not the end of the road but it is a critical step forward in making sure that we continue a bipartisan, thoughtful and constructive dialogue on how do we deal with an immigration system that's broken and that doesn't make America as competitive as it could be.
I want to close by thanking Senator Alexander for his leadership on this, for allowing me to work with him and produce a bill that is streamlined, that is simple, that is accessible and can contribute to making America a land that continues to welcome and celebrate the real job creators: inventors and innovators from all parts of the world.
Senator Alexander.
Senator Alexander: Senator Coons is one of the most eloquent speakers that we have in the Senate. He did a beautiful job explaining the bill and I hope it attracts from both Democrats and Republicans. He mentioned the fact there are other immigration issues, and there are. There are a number of ones that I would like to work on. And get something done on. I was here when we tried a comprehensive immigration plan a few years ago. It had strong bipartisan support, but one of the lessons we learned, I think, in that effort was that we don't do comprehensive well here in the Senate.
Sometimes it's better to go step by step. That's been true for a long time. We remember Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser but Henry Clay's greatest compromise wasn't passed by Henry Clay. He failed. And it nearly ruined his health and he went to Massachusetts to recover from it. And a senator named Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois, the home of our assistant Democratic leader, came to the floor and introduced the Clay compromise section by section, and each section passed with a different coalition - with Senator Sam Houston being the only senator who voted for each one of them.
So my hope is that with the broad support that we have for this very simple idea, pin a green card on the lapel of a gifted graduate of an advanced program in science, technology, engineering, and math, allow them to stay here and create jobs here instead of forcing them to go home, I hope that we have such strong support for this idea, that we can go ahead and pass it and then we can follow that up with the other necessary steps that we need to do on immigration and hopefully we can do that with a coalition that represents Democrats and Republicans, as well.
So this is a great idea, and somebody might say why don't they just do it the way we're doing it now. Right now it's H1B visas. As everyone knows, who is an employer, they're complicated, they’re burdensome, there is not enough of them. This is simple. It’s a new visa, you get it if you’re admitted, you get to stay 12 months while you look for a job, you get a job, you get a green card and there’s no cap on the number.
That's the idea and I thank Senator Coons for his leadership. I look forward to turning this good idea, this piece of unfinished business in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, into law.
Senator Coons: Thank you, Senator Alexander. I might in closing say the economics of this legislation are simple but as Senator Alexander and I recognized, any step towards immigration reform is complicated. Making it easier for foreign-born American-educated innovators to stay in the United States is just one aspect of many of the urgently needed steps to reform our outdated immigration system.
I see Senator Durbin has come to the floor. I'm proud to cosponsor with him the DREAM Act, I also support the Uniting American Families Act. There are other pieces of legislation essential to allow to us to recognize and strengthen the role that immigrants play in the fabric of our country, but I think this opportunity today to move forward a bipartisan bill that focuses on this one area without caps, with a new class of immigration visa, is an important contribution to moving this discussion forward for all of us.
I want to thank Senator Alexander for his leadership.
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