Spokesmen for business interests too often ignore the effects of advocacy in their immediate special interest at the expense of the general interest of their country. The market mechanism of balancing supply and demand determines wages and guarantees there is no long-term labor shortage in this country, and government's tipping the scales by importing foreign labor is a deliberate frustration of the mechanism that will ultimately and inevitably lead to a true shortage of STEM workers.

There is ample documentation of the collusive fraud of the pipeline studies promoted by NSF with the help of NAS and strategic leaks to willing tools. If anyone wants to know the historical truth, I recommend distinguished Washington science reporter Daniel S. Greenberg's book _Science, Politics, and Money: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion_, which gives the story in two short chapters; and the House Science Committee's hearing of April 8, 1992 by Rep. Howard Wolpe. NSF not only silenced and damaged the careers of the statistician and economist who recognized the absurdity of equating the drop of new college STEM grads following graduation of the baby boom's peak cohort, they conveniently never bothered to correct those who misunderstood that their term of art "cumulative shortfall" did not mean "shortage" and that the assumptions of their model were demonstrably invalid.

After nearly a quarter of a century of H-1B's replacing American workers in STEM and disincentivizing students to major in STEM, it is a fact that only 40% of Americans graduating in STEM ever find STEM jobs, and yet they've amassed massive college loan debts. The glut of STEM labor occasioned by H-1B, E-3, L-1,EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 has seriously depressed wages, and it is very hard for Americans in STEM to remain in STEM after age 40 (see _Science_ writer Beryl Lieff Benderly on the “shelf-life of a STEM degree); for the partially disabled, it is nearly impossible. Re-tooling in another discipline – the facile answer of H-1B proponents – after spending so many years in college, amassing high indebtedness and staying out of the labor pool, is impractical except for the single.

I recall an immigration attorney advocating H-1B expansion, who confided that he wouldn't want his kids majoring in STEM because STEM workers (like his sister) have to work awfully hard and there are much easier ways to earn a living, oblivious to the rebuttal of a STEM shortage that his comment made.

The idea that there has been a long-term shortage of native talent in a nation as advanced and populous as the US is absurd. Businesses that cannot find Americans ready, willing, and able to fill STEM jobs, need to increase the pay offered for the job to the US market wage or seek training in hiring.