Harvard Investor: Science Establishment Uses Visas to Exclude Black Americans from STEM

This image depicted a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist, who was
CDC
Neil Munro

The American science establishment is rushing to display support for the Black Lives Matter movement, but it is fighting to exclude blacks, women, and other minorities from science, a prominent tech investor declared in a June 11 YouTube video.

“The science establishment fights to make sure that it doesn’t have to take extraordinary measures to bring blacks, women, other minorities into science by using our immigration system,” said Eric Weinstein, a Harvard-trained scientist who is also the managing director at Thiel Capital. 

“My middle finger is pointed straight at you: You’re weak, you’re cowardly, you don’t deserve to be in charge of science,” he said.  

The recent declarations by science managers of their support for black Americans “is an entire sham,” he said, continuing:

If those people care so deeply about black lives mattering and getting black people into STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math], here’s what you do: You reinstitute mandatory retirement for people who’ve been in their job for 20 years and [have shown] very little productivity. And you cut off the supply of visas so that you can’t pay for work by giving people immigration [benefits, such as citizneship] and you’re forced to use the labor market. And then you stop talking about how beautiful it is that science is international — not because it isn’t international — but because that is a cover story.

Weinstein has long argued that top science managers helped to flood the labor market for college graduates by creating the modern H-1B program in 1990.

In a 2017 report, Weinstein showed how top science managers allied in the late 1980s with business leaders to invent a claimed shortage of American scientists. This fake shortage stampeded legislators to expand the H-1B program in the 1990 immigration expansion bill signed by President George H.W. Bush.

Weinstein wrote:

American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the U.S. labor market.

Since then, the floodgates have been opened wider, so pushing many Americans out of careers in science and technology.

Each year, the federal government allows companies, laboratories, and universities to import and hire 500,000 foreign workers, including 100,000 H-1Bs, roughly 400,000 new graduates of U.S. colleges, plus many thousands of J-1 “scholars.”

Roughly half of the universities’ apprentice scientists, dubbed postdocs, are foreign-born.

Nationwide, companies and universities employ a population of roughly 1.3 million visa workers, the vast majority of whom are Asian men. Despite many private lawsuits, the federal and state governments do not enforce anti-discrimination laws to the U.S. executives, university managers, and foreign-born managers who hire blocs of Asian men instead of diverse American graduates and professionals.

Breitbart News has shown how U.S. executives and science managers prefer visa workers because they work hard for little money. They comply with their managers’ demands for weekend work, for transfers from city to city, and for years of transient gig worker contracts, and there is such a large quantity of them that they can smother frequent quality problems.

The foreign workers comply because they know their managers control their lives: The managers can ruin their careers by deporting them back to India or China, and they can nominate them for the huge prize of a green card and citizenship.

With such a huge alternative supply of subordinate, cheap, skilled labor, U.S. managers avoid hiring the outspoken Americans and unconventional graduates who might leave the managers’ top-priority projects for a better offer elsewhere.

Breitbart News has extensively covered the scale of the hidden visa worker economy as well as its damaging impact on American graduates, professionals, scientists, and national innovation.

Federal data shows that few black Americans get jobs in the tech industry or in university laboratories, despite many declarations by CEOs and science managers of a need for more minorities and women.

“If you want to get women and minorities, and everybody else, into science, here’s what you do,” Weinstein said:

You allow the labor market to work without using visas as labor relief, [and] you start classifying the workers who are in the labs as workers and not calling them “students” or “postdoctoral students.”

“I care about my black brothers and sisters one hell of a lot more than you do,” Weinstein said to the science managers:

I’ve been at this since the 1980s. And if you read my papers and you read my work, you will see that it has been consistent …

The soul of American science is the middle finger. So consider this National Science Foundation, Science Magazine, Nature magazine as a challenge: My middle fingers is pointed straight at you. You’re weak, you’re cowardly. you don’t deserve to be in charge of science. You’ve jumped the shark. You don’t know what you’re doing. And if you want to talk about how to get blacks into science, I‘m absolutely your guy.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.

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