A COMBINATION OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS, and insufficient interest by Americans, are threatening American science. according to this report.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

My God.you mean market forces work? What a shock.

I mean, this looks like a great recruiting strategy:

Offer a bunch of intelligent people a career path that requires 10 years of hard work to get the right to land a $30,000/year job with no job security. Oh.and you have to move every two years for an indeterminate time period.

Let them get a good look at a bunch of demoralized 30-somethings who are trying to compete for limited jobs and funds against an entire world’s worth of scientific talent (over 50% of the hiring pool in the US is made up of non-citizens). Make sure that the non-citizens are seriously motivated to work insanely hard, because if they’re not employed in a visa-permitted category, they have to go home.*

(*And why are they here? Usually because there aren’t even any post-doc positions in their home countries.)

Demolish the tenure system to the point that the ability to get multiple grants with an average acceptance rate of 10%) is a requisite for keeping your job, once you do actually manage to find one.

Yeah, sign me up.

Now sure, the truly brilliant people are OK in this system-but there’s no room for what a friend (a Ph.D in chemistry who “defected” into the computer industry) calls the “utility infielders”. And established scientists are amazed that students don’t like those odds?

Unfortunately, research is a hell of a lot of fun, which is why I keep banging my head against a brick wall. But if I knew at 18 what I know now, I wouldn’t be doing this for a living.

Sign me, anonymously please, as

A cynical but still fighting American-born post-doc

Perhaps reports like this one will encourage some rethinking of these incentive structures.