In the 80's a study that was bogus but used as an excuse anyway (sound familiar?) said America would be short STEM graduates and we need an influx of cheap labor H1B's. Some of the history behind this begins with stressingDiversity.Nothing wrong with helping qualified people. But who gets the help when diversity is the agenda?

ps://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2000/nsb00215/nsb00215_5.pdf

This was the leadership of the NSF in the mid 1980's-

New Director Stresses Diversity

Education and workforce issues were high priorities for the two men who took the agency’s top jobs in 1984. In May, physicist Roland W. Schmitt, a two-year member of the Board and senior vice president for research and development at General Electric Company, was elected Board Chair. Following the sudden departure of Director Edward Knapp, President Reagan promoted Erich Bloch from Deputy Director-designate to the Director’s post. Bloch was a hard-driving IBM engineer who had managed the development and manufacture of the IBM System 360 computer technology. All of a sudden, the Foundation had acquired a pair of leaders from industry.

Bloch and Schmitt got along well and thought similarly about changes needed at NSF. Homer A. Neal, whose Board panel was devising the Foundation’s undergraduate initiatives at this time, describes Bloch’s results-oriented style this way: “Bloch would sit in our meetings. Sometimes he would pick up on something and carry it out before we had finished.” Part of Bloch’s agenda was to help more people in underrepresented groups—minorities, women, and persons with disabilities—join America’s scientific and technical workforce, including those doing advanced research. This meant increasing the numbers of these individuals who completed a K-12 mathematics/science curriculum.

Such an ambitious goal required enormous change for the Foundation, including the identification and recruitment of qualified professionals from these groupsto NSF staff positions and to advisory and merit review panels. Overseeing this effort for the Board from 1984 to 1986 was Simon Ramo, co-founder of aerospace giant TRW, Inc. Ramo agreed to head the Board’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) Committee because, he told Schmitt, “that’s the future.”Minutes of Ramo’s EHR Committee meetings show that managers from all parts of NSF were systematically called on to explain exactly what steps they were taking to satisfy the new diversity mandate.

Bloch argued that diversifying the technical workforce was particularly urgent in light of limited numbers of qualified Americans to fill available jobs. The Office of Technology Assessment would later sharply criticize the data behind the shortfall” argument,'' but Walter Massey, a Board member in the 1980s and the Foundation’s second African American director, credits Bloch and the Board with opening the door to wider participation by underrepresented groups. The diversity campaign gained clout when programs such as EPSCoR were consolidated with programs for minorities in the renamed Education and Human Resources Directorate

https://engineering.buffalo.edu/materials-design-innovation/summer-institute/ebs2019/about-erich.html

Erich Bloch

(Sorry if attempts at formatting didn't work)

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA426584.pdf

Thus it is said that the United States must import students, scientists, and engineers from abroad to fill universities and work in the private sector—though even this talent pool may dry up eventually as more foreign nationals find attractive opportunities elsewhere.

Yet alongside such arguments—sometimes in the very same publications in which they appear—one learns of layoffs of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers in the computer, telecommunications, and aerospace industries, of the deep frustration and even anger felt by newly minted PhDs unable to find stable employment in traditional science and engineering career paths, and of senior scientists and engineers who are advising undergraduates against pursuing careers in their own fields. Why the contradictory reports on professions routinely deemed critical to the success of the American economy? Is it possible that there really is no shortage in these fields?

The recent history of shortage forecasts begins in the mid-1980s, when the then leadership of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a few top research universities began to predict "looming shortfalls" of scientists and engineers in the next two decades.

Their arguments were based upon quite simplistic demographic projections produced by a small policy office reporting to the NSF director—projections that earlier had been sharply criticized by the NSF's own science and engineering workforce experts.

Only a few years later, it became apparent that the trends actually pointed toward a growing surplus of scientists and engineers. In 1992, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight conducted a formal investigation and hearing about the shortfall projections, leading to much embarrassment at the NSF. In his opening remarks at the hearing, the subcommittee's chairman. Democrat

Howard Wolpe of Michigan, declared that the "credibility of the [National Science Foundation is seriously damaged when it is so careless about its own product." Sherwood Boehlert, the subcommittee's ranking Republican and now chair of the full House Science Committee, called the NSF director's shortfall predictions "the equivalent to shouting 'Fire' in a crowded theater." They were "based on very tenuous data and analysis. In short, a mistake was made," he said. "Let's figure out how to avoid similar mistakes, and then move on." (U.S. House of Representatives, 1993, pp. 1-10.)

Boehlert's advice was not heeded.

How many qualified students were denied admittance or financial help for "diversity" or giving preference to foreign students? We know the H1-B hiring is for cheap labor, not merit. But how many foreigners got higher education, were admitted to a PhD program, or received financial aid via the taxpayer in the name of diversity and a manufactured shortage of STEM students? Taking down America begins with denying our best and brightest over imports.

Was this intentional? Why does educating Americans in STEM have to be stopped?

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-messages-reveal-andreessens-fury-universities-declared-war-70-country

In a recent interview with billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Andreessen raised concerns about access to elite education.

“If you’re the parents of a smart kid where I grew up [rural Wisconsin] and you think you’re going to get them into a top university in this country, you’re fooling yourself,” Andreessen said. “What level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have basically cut out of the loop for the last 50 years?”