On December 7, 2013, a New York Times editorial reported on a grave threat to the nation: American students too lazy and dull to cut it in a competitive world. It reported:
American students are bored by math, science, and engineering. They buy smartphones and tablets by the millions, but don't pursue the skills necessary to build them. ... Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they're not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering, or math, known collectively as STEM, according to a survey of more than a million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring. (Within five years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings.)
The Times's alarm was well timed. It appeared on Pearl Harbor Day. But as immigration scholar and author Michael Teitelbaum revealed last October in a speech at the University of California, Davis, it was flat wrong. You can see Teitelbaum's speech here. (Go to the 26:08 mark for the beginning of his comments on the editorial.)
Teitelbaum disclosed that the editorial was based on a badly flawed paper published by ACT, the organization best known for the college admissions and placement test.
Teitelbaum noted that the editorial and the ACT study contradicted other studies documenting that interest in STEM courses has been surging among American students increasingly attuned to both the demands of the labor market and the challenge of foreign competition. He said ACT later acknowledged to him that its study had been fundamentally flawed. And he noted that ACT put out a second study with accurate information.
"So it's not that the New York Times editorial writers made it up," Teitelbaum said. "It's just that they only looked at one of the studies and maybe they liked the finding. It was consistent with their opinion—so they quoted it."
The Times editorial page, flush with flawed information and its own ideological commitment to bring millions of foreign workers to the United States, has become a cheerleader for the Microsofts and the Facebooks and the host of other IT companies eager for access to foreign workers who, they claim, are their only chance to fill the void left by feckless Americans.
They are all part of the strange-bedfellows coalition that includes not only the National Council of La Raza, the ACLU, the SEIU, and the United States Conference of Catholic bishops, but also the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable.
Like all of these groups, whose self interest in expanding immigration is obvious, the Times insists that an influx of foreign workers is necessary because Americans either refuse to do low-paying work or lack the initiative to prepare themselves for the high-paying STEM fields. To paraphrase a more perceptive New Yorker named Paul Simon, the Times sees what it wants to see and disregards the rest.
The errant editorial even ignored a column written five months earlier by Bill Keller, the paper's former executive editor and a rare Upper West Side voice of moderation on immigration.
Keller wrote that the immigration reform bill passed early that year by the Senate "is especially — perhaps overly — generous to employers at the high end" in making it possible to import foreign tech workers. He then cited Michael Teitelbaum's work, noting that Teitelbaum "points out [that] you can find shortages of skilled labor at some times, in some fields, in some places, but over all there is plenty of domestic STEM talent looking for work."
NOTE: This post was edited after publication.