President Joe Biden

Intel's planned microchip plant outside Columbus, Ohio, is the administration's poster child for reviving high-tech manufacturing. But failure to allow a ...

While most companies are still planning to set up shop in the U.S. regardless of what happens with STEM immigration, Shahoulian said inaction on that front will inevitably limit the scale of investments by Intel and other firms. He also dinged the chip companies, claiming the issue is “not always as straightforward” as the industry would like to frame it and that tech companies sometimes hope to pay less for foreign-born talent. And the ability of this country to invest in anything for 20 years is not phenomenal.” Cornyn blamed that in part on the far right’s reflexive outrage to any easing of immigration restrictions. Students coming out of American universities with those degrees are largely foreign nationals — and increasingly, they’re graduating without an immigration status that lets them work in the U.S., and with no clear pathway to achieving that status. It’d be a relatively small number of people — a February study from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology suggested the chip industry would only need around 3,500 foreign-born workers to effectively staff new U.S.-based factories. Harrison is anxious, however, over how quickly he and other leaders in higher ed are expected to convince thousands of students to sign up for the required STEM courses and join Intel after graduation. Quietly, however, many of those same lawmakers — along with industry lobbyists and national security experts — fear all the chip subsidies in the world will fall flat without enough high-skilled STEM workers. A rapid boost in processing power stuffed into ever-smaller packages led to the information technology boom of the 1990s. But even as Biden signs into law more than $52 billion in “incentives” designed to lure chipmakers to the U.S., an unusual alliance of industry lobbyists, hard-core China hawks and science advocates says the president’s dream lacks a key ingredient — a small yet critical core of high-skilled workers. In his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called this 1,000-acre spread of corn stalks and farmhouses a “field of dreams.” Within three years, it will house two Intel-operated chip facilities together worth $20 billion — and Intel is promising to invest $80 billion more now that Washington has sweetened the deal with subsidies. Since the 1960s, scientists — working first for the U.S. government and later for private industry — have tacked transistors onto wafers of silicon or other semiconducting materials to produce computer circuits.