Webinar: US could do more to attract STEM talent

While the US needs international talent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and has an advantage in attracting such skilled people, the government should do more to welcome them, according to some experts.

"We have some tools in our toolbox that we haven't been using as much as we could regarding talent and encouraging … talent to come to our country," said Amy Nice, an immigration law and policy expert, who was assistant director for the International S&T (science and technology) Workforce at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

She said the US needs to do "a better job of explaining to industry, to academia, and to individual scholars, students, and experts what these tools are, that they are actually at our fingertips today and that we have not been using them to attract and retain STEM talent. She called the initiative "a big goal of mine".

Nice spoke during a webinar on Jan 10 titled "The Future of the US-China Competition for Human Capital", hosted by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS).

Nice stressed the importance of advanced human capital in STEM, especially international STEM talents at the graduate or PhD level. She said that 90 percent of all STEM experimental development and all STEM applied research in the US is funded by and conducted by companies today, quite different from other countries around the globe.

So, there is "a need for a lot more collaboration between industry and academia" and "a lot of critical need for advanced stem talent in the industry".

"Approximately 50 percent of all master's and PhD programs across STEM fields are international students," said Nice, suggesting that the US immigration system should "provide sufficient certainty and predictability for the very people that we want to attract and retain".

"We have to do a lot better job of providing that certainty and predictability," she said.

Nice also mentioned that a weakness in the US efforts in human capital is not looking to underserved and underrepresented communities in the education system.

Another panelist, Yasheng Huang, the faculty director of Action Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, singled out the China Initiative as detrimental to retaining talent.

The China Initiative was a controversial program launched by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 is to probe trade-secret theft and economic espionage activities considered threats to US national security.

According to an investigation published in December 2021 by the MIT Technology Review, the program "appears to be an umbrella term for cases with almost any connection to China".

The China Initiative was ended by the DOJ in February 2022, amid widespread criticism for creating a climate of fear among Asian Americans.

Huang said that although the China Initiative was terminated, some investigations were still there, and their impact remained. He relayed a story about when a delegation of American scientists who attended an overseas conference returned to the US.

"Every single one of the Chinese American scientists was stopped at the customs for long periods of time, whereas other members of the delegation went through the customs without problems," he recalled.

Huang also mentioned the case of Professor Charles Lieber, a leading American chemist at Harvard University, who was found guilty of "disclosure issues" under the China Initiative.

"You know, there are technical issues, there are legal issues. But one of the FBI agents who would testify at his trial said without apology that they began to pay attention to him because every single one of his postdocs was Chinese. So, that was the information on which they base their decision," said Huang, "and there are other notorious cases going after Chinese American scientists."

As the founding president of an organization called the Asian American Scholar Forum, Huang and his team has been doing more research on the topic.

"We did a large-scale survey on fear factor and the finding there is really, really shocking. You know, even though 89 percent of the people that we surveyed want to contribute to America and to contribute to scientific activities in the US, something like 68 or 70 percent of them fear for their career and fear for their life. Some 40-plus percent of the researchers do not want to apply for federal grants," Huang said.

"And this is after the China Initiative has been terminated. We have got to address this issue. We are killing ourselves if we do something like this," he said.

"Science is collaborative. Innovations are collaborative," Huang concluded.