"Most of us [Professors] know very well -- and even admit to each other privately -- that the reason we import so many foreign graduate students is that they are a source of unquestioning, hard-working, intelligent, cheap labor who require little or no advising and who help us further our own careers."- David R. Burgess, Chairman of the department of biological sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, The Chronicle of HigherEducation,10/10/97, Opinion, Page: B7
"There is a suspicion that international postdocs are in many cases a form of slave labor within the American research establishment.""There are some very touchy issues surrounding the question of international postdoctoral students. We can certainly identify some advantages to having these students on our campuses....international postdoctoral students provide a good deal of low-cost talent for our universities. They often serve as teachers in our research laboratories by supervising both doctoral and masters students."
- Postdoctoral Education in America by Steven B. Sample, President, University of Southern California, September 23, 1993"To those of us who are Professors in research universities, those foreign graduate students have, temporarily at least, rescued our way of life. In fact we are justly proud that in spite of the abysmal state of American education in general, our graduate schools are a beacon unto the nations of the world. The students who come to join us in our research are every bit as bright and eager as the home-grown types they have partially replaced, and they add energy and new ideas to our work. However, there is another way of looking at all this. Graduate students in the sciences are often awarded teaching assistantships, for which they may not be well qualified, because their English is imperfect. In general, through teaching or research assistantships or fellowships, they are paid stipends and their tuitions are either waived, or subsidized by the universities. Thus our national and state governments find themselves supporting expensive research universities that often serve undergraduates poorly (partly because of those foreign teaching assistants) and whose principal educational function at the graduate level has become to train Ph.D's from abroad. Some of these, when they graduate, stay on in America, taking some of those few jobs still available here, and others return to their homelands taking our knowledge and technology with them to our present and future economic competitors. It doesn't take a genius to realize that our state and federal governments are not going to go on forever supporting this playground we professors have created for ourselves."- David Goodstein, Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates"We'd be worse off still if we didn't turn to the third world for PhD's. Our own students shy away from graduate school, so we strip Asia of her best and brightest students. We give them an education and citizenship in exchange for making our machines run. Half our new engineering PhD's are immigrants. Without them, our colleges and hi-tech industry would be in real trouble."- John H. Lienhard, University of Houston, "SCI. & ENGR. EDUCATION", Engines of Our Ingenuity, No. 465.