Immigration Moratorium: Chapter 2

In the previous post, we found that domestic (citizen and permanent resident) bachelor’s degree production is more than adequately meeting employment growth published by the BLS. Even with an additional 22 months (2014-Oct. 2015) of employment growth beyond the college degree data period (2000-13), there would still be 6.42% slack (not employed) in the college educated population.

For this post we are looking at STEM degree production, on the domestic side (citizens and permanent residents), for the fourteen years of data  we have 4,945,112 STEM bachelor’s and 3,311,070 associate’s degrees conferred, for a total of 8,256,182.  Without factoring in any immigration and considering the STEM sector employment level for 2014 below, domestic degree production can replace the entire STEM employment market in a little over 15 years. Most of these graduates need 40 years of employment to reach their retirement age.

There were over 8.3 million STEM jobs in May 2014, representing about 6.2 percent of total U.S. employment. Seven of the 10 largest STEM occupations were related to computers. These occupations included applications software developers, with employment of 686,470; computer user support specialists (563,540); and computer systems analysts (528,320). Wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives of technical and scientific products (335,540) was the largest STEM occupation that was not specifically computer related. Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf

The BLS 2014 projection for STEM employment is that STEM employment “is projected to grow to more than 9 million between 2012 and 2022. That’s an increase of about 1 million jobs over 2012 employment levels.” [PDF]  However, from averages taken from the table below,  the STEM bachelor’s degrees will be conferred will be 3.53 million and the associate’s degrees will be another 2.37 million.  Basically, there are 5.9 million (citizen and permanent resident) students in the pipeline for an employment growth projection of 1 million jobs.

The following educational sectors are adhock and do not represent the exact degrees in the paragraph above, but with the disparity in numbers, all we need is common horse-sense to support an immigration moratorium.

The following table displays the (2000-13) degrees conferred to temporary resident (foreign students). Attempting to grant work authorization to just U.S. educated foreign workers will add 556,490 job seekers to the STEM workforce, bringing the competition to 6.5 candidates for each projected job. Additionally, under President Obama’s planned OPT extension, foreign STEM students will receive up to a three year Social Security and Medicare contribution exemption, combining the employee and employer share this is a discount of 12.4% on Social Security and another 2.9% on Medicare combined contributions. 

Source data: https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/webcaspar/