As university officials continue to push for higher enrollment in STEM programs, experts warn that students in these fields could lose out if a comprehensive immigration reform bill passes on Capitol Hill.

A bill aimed at comprehensive immigration reform passed in the Senate this summer by a 68-32 vote. Lawmakers lauded it as a step toward progress, but experts said a provision that offers a shortcut to employment for highly skilled foreign workers in STEM fields could overwhelm the field and drive down wages. If the House chooses to hear and pass the bill, foreign workers looking for STEM jobs could be granted temporary residence, and undocumented STEM students might be able to go through an expedited process to receive a green card.

Tech giants such as Microsoft have been active in their support of the changes, citing a shortage of qualified domestic workers and a need to combat brain drains — in which highly skilled immigrants are deterred by the complicated American immigration process. 

“Under current law, many face a wait of more than 10 years to obtain a green card, and they may decide that a career in the United States simply isn’t worth that kind of instability,” Brad Smith, legal and corporate affairs executive vice president and general counsel at Microsoft, said before Congress in April. “As a result, we risk losing these experts to other countries, where they will compete against us. This bill goes a long way toward keeping their talents in the United States and helping to grow our economy.”

Smith also touched on the number of high-skilled jobs in the tech sector going unfilled. At Microsoft, 6,300 open positions remained vacant, and the issue is a national one: There are close to 4 million unfilled job openings, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kirwan has expressed his interest in bolstering STEM enrollment to produce more workers in the field to fuel the state’s “innovation economy.”

But David North, a Center for Immigration Studies fellow, said the worker shortage isn’t the drought it seems. 

Based on projections compiled by the CIS, STEM job openings over the next 10 years would stand at about 2.5 million, while the nation’s universities would churn out about 3.9 million graduates those fields.

Other opponents say the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough American STEM graduates — data shows there aren’t enough who are either qualified or willing to take those positions. 

According to a 2013 report by the Economic Policy Institute, 35.5 percent of computer and information science graduates and 46.1 percent of engineering and engineering technology graduates were employed outside the STEM fields of their majors a year after their graduation in 2009. And 52.7 percent of those computer and information sciences graduates and 31.3 percent of those with engineering and engineering technology degrees said they opted out of the field of their degree because they were unhappy with the pay, promotion opportunities and working conditions of the jobs available. About 32.2 percent and 36.3 percent of computer science and engineering and engineering technology graduates, respectively, weren’t in a job in any STEM field. 

North said there is room for a foreign worker program, but companies claiming that “there is a shortage of STEM workers and therefore they have to bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers every year to work in the STEM field” is “self-serving.” Bringing in these extraneous workers would flood the supply of labor in these disciplines and lower wages, North said, which only benefits  the tech companies.

This, North said, will cause citizens and green card holders studying in these fields to be “hired away” to other fields, which would do very little to help address the supposed shortage of STEM workers. 

“In general terms, we don’t need massive immigration of additional STEM workers,” North said. Companies like Microsoft “don’t need to use the immigration system to bring in great quantities of people to do mundane STEM work; we have plenty of people in this country who can do this work.”