Foreign-born engineers are particularly prevalent on U.S. college campuses (where many of them earned their doctorates). Many of these immigrants are teaching, thereby helping ease a shortage of engineering faculty caused by a decline in the number of U.S. citizens who pursued engineering doctoral degrees in the previous decade. Certain engineering jobs in U.S. industrial firms--those with a Pentagon connection--require U.S. citizenship, so many immigrants have an easier time finding jobs on college campuses. Without these immigrants, some engineering schools would have had difficulty surviving (see Barber and Morgan 1987, 1988). But there is a downside to the increasingly foreign makeup of many engineering departments: Reports of language (see Barber, Morgan, and Torstrick 1987) and cultural barriers have surfaced, the latter leading to charges of insensitivity toward women and minorities (see Vetter 1992a). There is also the view held by some labor market economists that easy access of foreign nationals to U.S. college campuses lets the United States continue to ignore its responsibility to develop science and engineering talent among women and underrepresented minorities (Bergmann 1992).

Few would disagree that immigrants with doctorates in engineering are making a valuable contribution to the U.S. economy and that without them, U.S. educational institutions' engineering departments would face a serious dilemma. There is less consensus on the immigration of engineers; efforts to increase immigration are sometimes seen as a means of keeping wages depressed (Engineering Manpower Commission 1991b). There is also concern about the economic consequences of the "brain drain" on both developed and developing countries. There is some evidence that an increasing number of foreign nationals--especially those from Taiwan and South Korea--are returning to their home countries (see chapter 2 and SRS 1993a).

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