Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (19 page)

Second, governmental support could kick-start the development of a cluster. Governments have the capital and influence needed for research and development projects too large for individual companies. In addition, government can provide infrastructure conducive to cluster growth and incentivize companies to reside in certain areas through tax incentives. For example, Vancouver is home to many companies in the movie industry because of the British Columbia Film and Television Tax Credit program. Returning to the previous point, governments could help promote or even develop the genomics database that will be necessary for the success of a life science cluster.

If America has what it takes to develop a genomics cluster, then the United States could simultaneously create a new industry ecosystem that alters the course of medicine and bolsters the country’s economy.

NANOTECHNOLOGY CLUSTER

Nanotechnology is another field of science that has developed rapidly over the last few decades. According to Roco, Mirkin, and Hersam in
Nanotechnology Research Directions for Societal Needs in 2020
, “Between 1990 and 2008, 17,600 companies from 87 countries were involved in nanotechnology publications and patent applications.”
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Nanotechnology is the study of matter at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. With the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981, we gained the ability to see and eventually to control individual atoms. Why was this critical? Because quantum effects take over at this scale. Properties, such as melting point, fluorescence, and electrical conductivity become size dependent. Nanotechnology essentially allows each and every atom to be put in its most efficient place.

Previously unimaginable inventions have come out of nanotechnology. Through metamaterials, we have almost achieved invisibility. A metamaterial is an artificially created matter that bends light around it. To the human eye, an object covered in a metamaterial appears invisible. In June 2013, Stanford made a breakthrough in creating invisibility through the use of optical metamaterials. Previous efforts only allowed invisibility within a limited range of optical wavelengths and, therefore, colors. A Stanford research team, however, has designed a material that can bend nearly all wavelengths of light visible to the human eye.
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Other nanotech breakthroughs include the discovery of graphene, the best heat-conducting material known to man, new cancer treatments, and energy-generating shirts. Penn State researcher John Badding and his team have developed the first fiber-optic solar cell. The fibers are thinner than human hair and can produce electricity. The U.S. military has already begun to invest in the fiber, which can power small electronics for soldiers in the field.
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In 2009, there was $254 billion worth of products using nanotechnology in the market.
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By 2015, global nanotech industry output is predicted to reach $2.4 trillion.
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It is no wonder that Jack Uldrich and Deb Newberry referred to nanotechnology as “an iceberg that threatens to sink even the ‘unsinkable’ companies.” Nanotechnology will come to change the business landscape, and the United States should aim to be at the front of the wave.

A nanotechnology cluster is bound to form soon. Nanotechnology knowledge is known to be highly tacit, which means that distance limits knowledge diffusion.
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Tacit knowledge is not easily spread written down or verbally, as it is best transferred face to face. Consequently, nanotech researchers and companies will tend to clump together, and investors will know where to locate themselves. Currently, the American cities with the most nanotech institutions are Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, and Raleigh. But since the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative was created in 2000, nations everywhere have also started their own national nanotech programs. If we look at spending by countries in purchasing power parity, we find that China spent more in funding nanotechnology than the United States did in 2011.
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In absolute terms, the United States still spent the most. But the fact of the matter is, the race for nanotech domination is on. According to Cientifica, which monitors the emerging technology landscape, the United States, China, and Russia are the most competitive when it comes to nanotechnology. After taking the quality of scientific institutions, capacity for innovation, and funding into account, these three countries are the most likely to win the race.
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Like the life science cluster, the window of opportunity to develop a nanotechnology cluster will only be open for so long, and whichever country succeeds will gain a significant advantage in the field. In 1983, Soete and Dosi observed about emerging microelectronics, “The switch from an old technological paradigm to a new one [opens] dramatic new possibilities of change in the international structure of supply, the relative position between countries and the pattern of international competitiveness.”
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If the United States would like this head start, it must implement immigration reform now. A Lux Research survey in 2007 found that out of twenty-six U.S. companies asked, 60 percent of them believed they would face a nanotechnology labor shortage. Nanotech is not so much an industry but rather a general-purpose technology, and so the jobs required to sustain a cluster range from manufacturing to research and development. Nanotechnology has been at the initial stages of the technology, development, and assimilation curve, so for a while now, nanotech has been research heavy and has relied on the work of scientists. Yet the trend is beginning to shift, as more products incorporate nanotechnology, and workers of all skill levels will be needed.

Noela Invernizzi, a fellow with the Science and Technology Innovation Program, has researched the effects of nanotechnology on labor. While she admits it may still be too early to analyze changes in labor, she believes this area must be looked at, and some changes can already be observed. Her results, published in the
Journal of Nanoparticle Research
, found nanotech is moving toward manufacturing. The manufacturing she is talking about is advanced manufacturing, which requires high technical and computer aptitudes. This shift will require more engineers and more machinists/machine operators, if we wish to keep manufacturing within the United States. These are two jobs that U.S. companies had a hard time filling, as reported by ManpowerGroup.

In 2007, a group of scientists, mostly from the University of Illinois–Springfield, researched the barriers to nanotechnology commercialization. They reported a story about how there are Nanosolar shingles for homes but a lack of installers for the shingles. Thus, we will also need more skilled trades workers because a good portion of nanotechnology falls into the energy realm, and buildings and homes will need workers to install the more energy-efficient products. Due to a shift away from vocational training, the United States is also greatly lacking skilled trades workers. Training a new generation of workers to adapt to our technological advances will take time, and by then, the United States may have lost the first-mover advantage.

As for the research and development of nanotechnology, our lower numbers of STEM graduates could be problematic down the road. In addition, many nanotech employees and scientists are foreign nationals, and as a result, they are often not allowed access to federal labs, further lowering potential scientific innovation.

To house the nanotechnology cluster, the United States must encourage immigrants with the relevant skills to come here. We should not only increase the H-1B cap, but we also should encourage skilled trades workers to immigrate to America. With government support in reformed immigration laws and capital investments in infrastructure, the United States could bring home the nanotech cluster.

OTHER REVOLUTIONARY FIELDS

Life science and nanotechnology are just two of many possible high-tech clusters that could form in the years to come. Others include shale oil and shale gas, robotics, 3D printing, defense-related technologies, and information technology, and even new fields of multimedia and entertainment. The rate of technological development in these fields has been astounding. As diverse as these fields are, a common thread tying them together is the need for experts in the STEM fields.

To house any of the above clusters, we will need immigrants to fill many of the STEM positions. We need to encourage foreign students to remain in the United States after graduation and raise the H-1B cap. In addition, we should consider changing some of the laws regarding foreign nationals working in the United States.

An example lies in the U.S. defense industry. World military spending in 2012 was $1.7 trillion, and U.S. military spending accounted for 39 percent of it.
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While U.S. military spending decreased in 2012, China and Russia, the second and third largest spenders after the United States, increased their military spending.
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A defense cluster already exists in the United States, but we are putting it at risk by completely restricting noncitizen immigrants from working in our military-industrial complex. We developed this blanket rule to prevent potential threats to our national security, but implementing this rule is indeed a threat to our national security. It further aggravates the labor shortage for our major defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and it limits the talent pool available to these defense contractors. Given the labor shortage, it would make more sense to allow noncitizens to work in certain designated areas with appropriate supervision.

Another high-tech cluster that affects national security is the shale oil and shale gas cluster. Within the last seven years, with new technological advancements, it was discovered that the United States holds substantial deposits of oil shale. According to the Energy Information Administration, the deposits hold an estimated fifty-eight billion barrels of potentially recoverable oil
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—enough to meet U.S. oil demand at current rates for another 250 years. In 2012, the International Energy Agency reported that the United States is projected to surpass Saudi Arabia in total oil production by 2020, making it the world’s largest oil producer. In other words, the reserve deposits will allow the United States to become energy independent.

While Americans constitute less than 5 percent of the world’s population, they consume 26 percent of the world’s energy. In addition, they account for about 25 percent of the world’s petroleum consumption, making the United States the world’s largest petroleum consumer. Consider the fact that in 2012, the United States imported around 40 percent of the petroleum it consumed. Some 28 percent of the imported petroleum came from Canada, 13 percent from Saudi Arabia, 10 percent from Mexico, 9 percent from Venezuela, and 5 percent from Russia.
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Energy independence will alter U.S. foreign policy as the U.S. policy has long been based on the belief of a growing scarcity of oil. The Energy Information Administration reported that the “U.S. could become completely independent of imports from outside of North America by 2020.”
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Furthermore, the reserves in place, such as the Eagle Ford, the Bakken, and those in the Permian Basin, also contain high volumes of natural gas. The large potential resource volumes reported for shale oil and gas have generated comparably large expectations for increased future oil and gas supplies in both the United States and the rest of the world. These expectations include the substitution of domestic gas for imported oil and the use of domestic gas as a cleaner or safer alternative for coal- and nuclear-generated electricity. Shale natural gas in the form of compressed and liquefied natural gas is becoming more viable as a fuel option as technological developments are made. The United States could go even further than energy independence and begin exporting gas.

The shale deposits have caused natural gas prices in the United States to remain around $3.45 mmBtu (one million British thermal units), while gas prices have been $8 to $9 in Europe and $16 to $19 in China and Japan. As a result, major industries are returning to the United States to benefit from the cheap gas, yet we need the skills for this dramatic turnaround in energy-intensive industries.

But energy is only one component of the potential of shale oil and gas. The U.S. plastics-producing industry is increasingly shifting away from oil-derived naphtha (which is a major ingredient in making both gasoline and ethylene used for plastics production), choosing instead to run plants on the gases butane or propane. It is also investing billions in plants that run on ethane, made from cheap shale gas. The U.S. plastics industry is now expanding for the first time in decades, as factories are able to cut production costs and to compete on a global scale. According to the association of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, three years ago, U.S. companies used oil-derived naphtha 50 percent of the time and shale gas ethane 50 percent of the time to produce ethylene. Today, U.S. companies use naphtha 20 percent of the time and ethane 80 percent of the time. This ratio is set to tip even further over the next six years as companies, including Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil, are planning $25 billion worth of new projects, which will mainly run on shale gas.