The Advanced Degree Immigration Arbitrage Opportunity

In my first read of Octogang's bipartisan immigration reform framework I thought that making high-skill reform conditioned on receipt of a STEM advanced degree from an American institution was too restrictive. I stand by that. There are lots of valuable skills outside the STEM fields, lots of valuable STEM workers who don't have advanced degrees — Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, where he studies, among other things, calligraphy — and lots of good institutions of higher education in foreign countries. On the other hand, you can read this as a very lax provision. What it does, in essence, is creates a huge incentive for foreign-born college graduates to apply to master's programs in STEM fields. Or looked at the other way, it gives accredited American universities a license to print money by launching foreigner-friendly master's programs in STEM fields. If an Indian computer pr...