Immigrant engineers in the US: Histories, Experiences, Contributions
Juan Lucena
Colorado School of Mines
‘The immigrant has built our railroads, tunneled our mountains and rivers, bridged our streams,
felled our forests, mined our coal and iron and
copper, erected our factories and industrial
plants, built our skyscrapers, even our cities themselves . . .” (from The Immigrant Invasion,
1913, p. 276)
“Engineer courses [at CSM] involve developing mathematical solutions to problems but there
was no math anywhere. Whenever there was something mathematical [in CSM classes], we
went to tables to look for the answers…The students [at CSM] had absolutely no interest in the
mathematical approach to problems which to me at the time was a great shock because
everything in France is mathematics.” (French exchange student at CSM)
Introduction
Migration of engineers to the US is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has taken place since
pre-Revolutionary times, often preoccupying US policymakers when the security of the country
is at stake. During three episodes of American history --The American Revolution, the end of
WWII, and recent global economic competition—policy makers have worried enough about the
migration of engineers to make the issue a legislative and political one. At other times, foreign
engineers have traveled to the US primarily to address specific circumstances in their home
countries that require them to travel abroad, apparently seeking better opportunities and higher
salaries in the land of plenty. However, they have come for multitude of reasons, including
helping the US build key technologies for national security, enhancing their social status at
home, escaping political persecution and civil strife, and acquiring knowledge and skills in a
country perceived to be “more advanced than” theirs. Since most of the episodes of migration of
engineers to the US follow specific circumstances in their home countries, most data and
accounts used here come from histories of engineers and engineering education institutions
outside the US which sometimes include a brief section, bibliographic notes, anecdotal evidence,
or tabulated data on engineering students traveling to the US. The migration of engineers to the
US has not necessarily followed large migration waves, for example, during the construction of
the trans-continental railroad or early 20th century. Most ‘wave’ migrants did not have the means
to pay for an engineering education.1
As we will see, there are no historical patterns among circumstances in immigrants’ home
countries that would help us understand why foreign engineers, in general, come to the US.
Specific circumstances in their home country and historical trajectories of their home institutions
influence engineers’ reasons for coming to the US, shape their behavior in the US, and condition
what they want to get out of their experience in the US. Since no two countries have the same
history of migration to the US or experience the same circumstances at any given period, no two
1
The lack of correspondence between wave migrations and migrations of engineers might explain why it was difficult to find
any data or accounts in migration studies literature. Most recent US sources on migrant engineers rely primarily on NSF data
gathering on foreign scientists and engineers that NSF began collecting since the late 1950s.
groups of engineers share the same experiences when coming to the US. For example, an
aggressive US immigration policy towards one country could be accompanied by a more
welcoming one towards another as is the case towards Mexico and India right now, resulting in
different experiences for engineers from those countries in the US (see Alarcon 2000)
This chapter briefly outlines the trajectories of immigrant engineers into the US at five
different periods of American history. In each period, we place the arrival of engineers within the
proper historical context at the time in both the US and their home country. We also explain
specifically some of their motives for visiting the US, their experiences while in the US, and,
when data is available, their contributions to the US and what the US experience do for them
after returning home.
Definitions: foreign visitor; immigrant; sometimes visitor becomes permanent immigrant and
vice versa.
1. Helping Independence
French engineers during the American Revolution
Why the US? During the American Revolution, top revolutionary commanders realized that in
order to win the war against the British they needed specialized technical knowledge not found
in American colonies. Complaining to the president of Congress, George Washington argued that
“The Skill of those engineers we have . . . [is] very imperfect and confined to the mere manual
exercise of canons…whereas the war in which we are engaged, requires a Knowledge
comprehending the Duties of the Field and Fortifications.” [quoted in Walker p.1] According to
Paul Walker, author of Engineers of Independence, “The shortage of qualified engineers was so
acute because formal schooling in siege craft, the erection of field fortifications, and technology
was practically nonexistent in America. Officers with technical knowledge had gained it largely
through their reading, and the few officers with engineering experience had acquired it while
serving under British engineers in the colonial wars.” [p.1] Both an unspoken ally of the
American Revolutionaries and home of the first engineering schools in Europe, France became
the source of military engineers coming to America in aid of a struggling revolutionary army. As
described by Walker,
Finally in April 1776 Congress sent Silas Deane, an ambitious ex-congressman from
Connecticut, to France as an agent. His instructions charged him with arranging the
exchange of American goods for needed supplies; purchasing clothing, munitions, and
artillery; and pursuing the possibility of an alliance with France. In addition, Congress
directed Deane to implement its earlier resolution regarding engineers. Deane’s mission
marked the first active recruiting by Congress of engineers across the Atlantic. As
Britain’s most powerful enemy and the center of technical education in Europe, France
was the most logical source of engineers for the Continental Army. The French engineer
corps was a highly developed branch of the army with its own rigorous training program
provided by the Ecole du Corps Royale du Genie, founded in 1749 at Mezieres. This
program combined theoretical instruction with practical exercise.[p. 6-7]
Experiences. French engineers were received with great deal of resistance because of the
privileges that they would receive without confirmation of their technical knowledge. Their
specialized knowledge would in some cases grant them higher ranks and salaries than most
Revolutionary officers. Walker explains the difficulties in recognizing legitimate engineers and
the reactions of Revolutionary officers to this knowledge and the privileges that it brought to
French engineers
Deane’s activities in France provoked immediate controversy at home; he was suspected
of profiteering and was criticized for encouraging so many foreigners to come to America
with promises of positions in the Continental army. Literally besieged by volunteers,
Deane often proved incapable of recognizing the best qualified officers among them…
However, the price of attracting engineers threatened to wreck the chances of obtaining
any more. Most members of Congress and Army officers were revolted to find foreigners
granted commissions that in many cases placed the newcomers above Americans already
in service… Washington declared further that he had two engineers (not named) “who in
my judgment know nothing of the duty of Engineers. Gentlemen of this profession ought
to produce sufficient and authentic testimonials of their skill and knowledge, and not
expect that a pompous narrative of their Services and loss of papers (the usual excuse)
can be a proper introduction into our Army…At the same time Major Generals John
Sullivan, Nathaniel Greene, and Henry Knox threatened to resign because Coudray [a
French engineer] the newcomer would outrank them. [p8-13]
The French engineering officers that came to America also had conflicts of their own. First, their
participation in the American Revolution could compromise France’s position with Britain. “As
a treaty of alliance had yet to be signed, the king [Louis XVI] ordered utmost secrecy
surrounding the preparations to send French engineer officers to aid the American Revolution.”
[p 12] Second, there was a split among Royal engineers between those who were recognized by
the King and those who disobeying his orders still came to America. “Meanwhile, under the
terms of the Deane-Coudray agreement, several French officers signed up as members of
Coudray’s [top military engineer recruited by Deane] staff. They began arriving in America in
March and April 1777. Because Coudray’s actions jeopardized the secrecy of French aid, the
French government ordered him to renounce his commission and stay home. He ignored the
order, stole out of the country, and finally reached America in May. Additional officers hoping to
join the Coudray group crossed the Atlantic of their own accord.” [p12] Third, those Royal
engineers authorized by the King wanted to be recognized as the only engineers allowed to
advice the continental army. But revolutionary officers needed many more engineers than the
King could authorize.
Still more volunteers, led by the Marquis de Lafayette, a wealthy nobleman inspired by
the American cause, also arrived in Philadelphia in July. They too had promises from
Deane. Congress was in a quandary. Lovell’s [French speakin member of Congress’
Committee on Foreign Applications] support for Duportail [French military engineer who
eventually became Chief Engineer for the Continental Army] was based on his conviction
that the four Royal Engineers were “the only officers . . . procured by the real political
Agents of Congress.” The congressman further argued that the four legitimate engineers
were being grossly underpaid and that the nature of their profession demanded that horses
be made available to them. Significantly, Lovell opposed utilizing “military strangers”
except in the case of engineers and one or two officers to serve as instructors-at-large for
the army. Once again the critical shortage of engineers and the desperate need for their
technical services combined to overcome American uneasiness about enlisting
foreigners.” [p13]
Key Royal engineers threatened to return to France when promises made to them were unmet.
Yet in the fall of 1777 the Royal Engineers nearly decided to return home because they
felt mistreated. They were particularly disturbed about matters of pay, perquisites, and
rank. Having used promises of rank and pay to attract foreign volunteers, particularly
engineers, the rebels were now not fulfilling their pledges. Though the patriots could ill
afford to lose Duportail’s services, a number of times during the war they came
perilously close to doing just that…In Duportail’s view the Chief Engineer should have
been at least a brigadier general to earn respect or his opinions among the generals he
frequently advised and to gain compliance with his commands. Moreover, Duportail
contended, higher rank could silence the personal insults leveled by those “who do not
love the French.” [p17-8]
Further contributions to the US. The end of the war raised significant questions about the need
for engineers for the newly independent country. Foreign engineers played significant roles in
helping settle these questions. First, there was the question of engineers as part of a standing
military that many considered unnecessary in times of peace. “When the Revolutionary War
ended Americans were faced with a perplexing decision: should they maintain a standing army in
peacetime? They had a longstanding fear that armies threatened individual liberties and no
tradition of a standing army. However, many citizens —led by a strong-willed group of
nationalists in the Congress and most officers in the Continental Army — argued that the
experiences of the Revolutionary War demonstrated the need for a change….[foreign] Engineer
officers were quick to recognize that the peacetime arrangements under consideration would
require an engineering department and a means of training its officers.” [p328] Second, there
was a question regarding the future training of engineers in the US. How could the US ensure a
supply of its own military engineers so that it could stop relying on foreign engineers?
Washington was the most vocal advocate for a military academy and relied heavily on French
engineers not only to make his case but to enlist them as the first teachers of engineers.
As demonstrated in the following selections from Washington’s plan, he supported the
union of the artillery and engineers into one corps. More important, he strongly urged the
establishment of at least one academy “for the Instruction of the Art Military; particularly
those Branches of it which respect Engineering and Artillery, which are highly essential,
and the knowledge of which, is most difficult to obtain.” Military education is crucial, he
said, “unless we intend to let the Science become extinct, and to depend entirely upon the
Foreigners for their friendly aid.” The Commander in Chief was acutely aware that most
of his best engineers during the Revolution were foreigners with formal training. Indeed,
in a letter written earlier to Duportail, Washington had admitted that it will doubtless be
necessary for us to retain some of the French Engineers in America,” at least while the
proposed military academies and manufactories were in their infancy. [p339]
Third, there was a question on the content of the knowledge to be learned by future military
American engineers. Here too French engineers were influential. In his peace establishment plan,
Pierre L’Enfant prescribed the knowledge areas that future qualified engineers needed to learn in
order to be recognized as such
Arithmetic—Is necessary for enabling them to make an exact mensuration of all work
together with a proper Estimate of Expences, etc.
Geometry—Without a perfect Knowledge of which no dependence can be made upon
any Survey nor upon any draught of any work or building whatsoever.
Mechanism [Mechanics]-Which is necessary to form a Sound idea and establish any
Confidence in the Strength or Composition of any Machine whatsoever, etc.
Architecture—Whose Knowledge is essential in Every building undertaking, etc.
Hydraulics—Which relate to water works and give the means of raising or hanging the
course of water, etc.
Drawing—Without the assistance of which no plans no Schemes whatsoever can be well
explain written explanation being insufficient… to give a just idea of the local and
particular Situation of any place, work building, etc.
Natural-Philosophy [Chemistry and Physics]—Natural philosophy being necessary to
judge of the nature of the Several materials which are used in building as that of the
quality of the Elements that of the water and of the air being necessary to judge of their
wholesome qualifications with a view to avoid making establishment in any places which
might be injurio[us]. [p357]
Conclusions. French engineers were instrumental in raising key questions about engineering in
early America. Questions such as ‘what is an engineer?’ (e.g., Are engineers only those who
come with the blessing of the King of France? Or are engineers those who, with or without the
authority of the King, can direct the constructions of fortifications? Are engineers those who are
taught the subjects listed above?) were being settled at the same time that the new country was
taking shape. Even in the absence of engineers educated in US soil, French engineers wrestled
with questions about knowledge and identity not only about themselves but also about the future
generations of engineers educated in US soil.
2. Building countries, defending tradition
In late 19th c, engineers from different countries traveled to the US for a number of reasons. Most
of them came looking for a prestigious technical education, first, in schools with established
trajectories such as RPI (1824), US Naval Academy (1845) and then later to schools that
inaugurated or expanded engineering programs with the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) such as
Rutgers Scientific School (1864). In the last decade of the 19th century engineering programs at
Californian universities became popular destinations, especially among Japanese visitors.
Looking at two specific groups of engineering students –Colombians and Japanese-- that came to
America in late 19th c can shed light into the complexity of their circumstances at home, their
motives for coming to the US, their experiences while in the US, and their contributions in the
US and at home.
Colombian engineers in late 19th c America
Why the US? Unlike Mexico and Brazil which had established mining and military engineering
training institutions since the first decades of the 19th c, Colombia did not have an engineering
school until 1847. When the military engineering school finally opened in 1847, it became
embroiled in intense political conflict between liberals and conservatives who were fighting for
political control of the country. When the Liberal Revolution (1849-1885) brought the expulsion
of the Jesuits and the secularization of education and liberalization of trade, elite families both
welcomed economic liberalization but were threatened by liberal education. Trade benefited their
already privileged economic status but secular education threatened their traditional catholic
values. Lacking an engineering school that would emphasize both industrial arts and catholic
values, some elite families began sending their sons to receive an engineering education in the
US in schools such as RPI, Stevens, and Berkeley. Those families who feared secularism and
wanted a religious educational environment sent their sons to the engineering programs in
universities with strong religious ties such as Brown University (engineering ca. 1849) and Yale
(engineering ca. 1847). After the first wave of students visited the US, a handful of schools
became popular among the next waves of visitors. As Frank Safford tells us
During the 1850s, a few Colombian parents began to acquire some information about
American institutions and thus to express more precise desires about the placement of
their sons…By the end of the 1860s Colombians were beginning to show considerable
sophistication in their choices of institutions. In 1869 the first Colombian graduated from
Rensselaer; between 1877 and 1886 five others studied there…At about the same time
two sons of Mariano Ospina Rodiguez took their degrees in mining engineering and
metallurgy from the University of California at Berkeley, a school that was also less than
a decade old. They were followed by various antioquenos interested in mining. Similarly,
Colombians in the 1870s and 1880s were studying mining engineering at Columbia, the
first American institution to develop this specialty…By the 1880s Latin Americans
studying technical subjects in the United States had become so common that agencies
specializing in the preparation, care, and placement of foreign students had emerged in
North America.” [Safford p. 156]
Elite families began thinking differently about national development. Most realized that sending
their sons abroad was good for the social status of their family and the “necessities” of their
country. A different conception of what the country needed at the time began to emerge. As the
father of one engineering student wrote
My object in sending him to that country [US] is that he learns some branches [of
knowledge] which may be useful in this one. But most especially I desire that he learn
mechanics and machinery, not so much theoretically as practically and in the part of most
immediate application to our necessities; like the use of pulleys, capstans, [illegible] to
move great weights, the construction of water wheels, the arrangement and management
of saws, mills, sugar mills and other machines used in agriculture, the construction of
wooden bridges, etc. Of course these branches [of knowledge] in particular can not be
learned in a secondary school and much less practically. [quoted in Safford, p153-4]
This desire clearly reflects a change from valuing mainly European theoretical education to
valuing US education as “only practical apprenticeship in industry would justify study in the
US.” [p154] Europe was still the favorite destination for those seeking a more humanistic and
theoretical education in the liberal arts, such as doctors and lawyers, but the US rapidly became a
favorite destination for aspiring engineers. After the Society of Colombian Engineers was
created in 1887, it became the main vehicle of dissemination for study abroad [p157]
Demographics. Latin Americans and were the largest group of foreign nationals at RPI in the
second half of the 19th c, comprising 10% of the total engineering graduates. Among the 140
Latin Americans that studied engineering at Rensselaer between 1850 and 1884, there were 66
Cubans, 25 Brazilians, 10 Puerto Ricans, 10 Mexicans, 7 Peruvians, and 5 Colombians, among
others. As Safford states, “Latin American attendance at Rensselaer and other technical schools
in le United States is particularly striking when compared with the record of other less-developed
areas of the world. The Latins were not only the most numerous foreign group at Rensselaer, but
also the first on the scene. The first trickle of Japanese students did not arrive at Rensselaer until
the middle the 1870s, by which time ten political entities in the Latin world boasted Rensselaer
alumni and seven Latin countries could claim graduates.” [Safford, p148]
Contributions to Colombia. Probably the most notable Colombians studying engineering in the
US were the Ospina brothers who after attending Berkeley went back to Colombia to create
Colombian National School of Mines (ca. 1888). Heavily influenced by their father and president
of Colombia (1857-61) Mariano Ospina, Pedro Nel and Tulio Ospina’s experiences at Berkeley
significantly shaped the way they organized their mining school’s administration and curriculum
with strong emphasis on experiential (field) education and utilitarian values. [ref Murray] A 1877
letter that Mariano sent to their sons while at Berkeley reflects the kind of knowledge that
students were being challenged to focus on for it was perceived as the knowledge that Colombia
needed to enter a yet unseen era of industrial development
not to mess around with analytical mechanics or transcendental math. Dedicate
yourselves only to what is applicable in practice by trying to acquire the knowledge of
what today are called mechanical engineers… there are attractive sciences like botany,
zoology, and astronomy that are not useful at all and should be left to the rich people to
contemplate. The same can be said for literature. Put as much religion and morals as you
can fit in your souls; applied science, a whole lot more; live languages [English], a lot;
theoretical science, literature and dead languages [Latin], very little; novels and poems,
not at all [quoted in Mora p 40; translation ours]
Upon return, Colombian engineers confronted economic stagnation due to a long lasting
civil war. They found themselves in a number of non-engineering activities, including politics,
fighting as enlisted soldiers, and building academic programs in the new National University. As
Safford summarizes, “Nevertheless, the students who took up careers in education may be
considered to have paid as investments in social overhead capital. As active participants in the
efforts to build the national university and the school system as a whole in the period after 1868,
they made some contribution to the future development of the country.” [Safford p162].
Only in the 1880s, Colombian engineers who study abroad were able to enlist in
significant numbers as engineers under the direction of Francisco Cisneros, a Cuban emigrant to
the US who also studied in Rensselaer and in 1874 moved to Colombia to build the first railroad
lines. Much different from the Colombians’ experience, Cisneros’ experience shows how diverse
the reasons for coming to the US to study engineering were among “Latin” students. As a
revolutionary exile escaping Cuba from Spanish persecution, Cisneros became an American
citizen (something that Colombians did not do) and an engineer through a combination of
attending classes at RPI, apprenticeship field experiences in New York state, and railroad
construction in the US and Peru. Unlike the Colombians, for whom an engineering certificate of
studies or diploma was important, Cisneros did not bother to secure one from RPI. [Horna p39;
note 8 in Mora p24]. Yet Cisneros created a group of engineers who defined their identity by
nationality and alma mater: Cuban Americans from Rensselaer. Opening a consulting office in
NYC, Cisneros and his peers were hired to build the first major railroad and canal network in
Colombia, becoming the most influential engineering group in the country at the time. His
engineering staff in Colombia included his closest Cuban American colleagues and a handful of
American engineers with railroad construction experience. He hired Colombian engineers but
only for jobs of lesser responsibility.
Japanese modernizers from Meiji Japan to US
The advent of the Meiji government in Japan in 1860s brought an emphasis on industrial
modernization and a change in policy towards importing foreign knowledge: “knowledge shall
be sought throughout the world, so that the foundations of the Empire may be firmly
established.” [Burks, p 372] Under this policy, prospective engineering students sought technical
education mainly in Great Britain and the US.
Why the US? Yokoi Saheida, the first Japanese to study math and science at Rutgers with the
goal of returning to Japan to apply these as an engineer, clearly stated the reasons for his study
abroad in 1867:
The stagnation of our country is not a recent matter. Under pressure from the Western
powers, the opening or closing of Japan became a heated issue, and the country has
become agitated and confused. Our country is surrounded on all sides by the sea…at the
moment Western ships are a hundred times more advantageous than pack horses, and
there is no reason to make disputes about policy for the defense of our island. What the
Western nations call their enlightenment is simply a technique. If we now exert ourselves
and master their knowledge, we have nothing to fear….When at some later date I have
completed my studies, I will be truly happy if can fulfill my duty to the Imperial realm by
clarifying the defects in the relations between us Japanese and the foreigners in the light
of the international law of all nations and universal principles.[quoted in Burks p164]
The government and prospective students viewed the US as an appropriate and
inexpensive destination, more advanced than Japan, yet not as advanced as Britain, France, or
Germany. In 1872, approximately 200 students traveled to the US, evenly divided among hu/ss,
law, and science and engineering. We can estimate that approximately 50 of these students were
enrolled in engineering studies [Burks p152] The main destinations in the US were, first, Rutgers
in NJ, the US Naval Academy in MD, and later Land Grant universities such as U of Michigan.
In the 1890s, the main destination became California, primarily Stanford and Berkeley [Burks
p153]
Experiences. Japanese engineering students came from the samurai class, often with the rank of
general, and were considered to be among the best and brightest in Japanese highly hierarchical
society. According to William Griffis, an educator who taught Japanese students both in Japan
and at Rutgers College,
It must be borne in mind that the Japanese students abroad are the very best
representatives of Japan’s intellect, of high social position, and hereditary culture. They
are not the average of her sons. They are her best, by nature, inheritance, character and
selection. They do not go abroad indiscriminately from the mass of the people, as, for
instance, American students flock to Germany. About ninety percent of the Japanese
students abroad are of the samurai class, and were carefully chosen on account of their
character and ability…. The average Japanese student is bright, quick, eager, earnest and
faithful. He delights his teacher’s heart by his docility, his industry, his obedience, his
reverence, his politeness. [quoted in Burks p 171-2]
Japanese students left Japan under very strict rules of conduct that reflected the
emergence of a strong national identity and ultimate loyalty to the Emperor. For example,
students could not become Christian, had to take wives and daughters to prevent mixing with
non-Japanese women and ensure a household with Japanese traditions, had to visit a Shinto
shrine, and vow to never disgrace country [Burks p150]. Ironically, even when their code of
conduct did not allow them to become Christians, most of the Rutgers American students and
faculty going to Japan did so as Christian missionaries.
Contributions to Japan. Upon returning home, Japanese engineering students or graduates
became counterparts to foreign engineering experts from the US, Britain, Germany, and France
already working in Japan. Eventually Japanese engineers replaced the foreigners in key positions
in industry, academia, and government. [p 373; also see Graeme article]. After 1895 the number
of foreign experts in science and engineering working in Japan declined significantly.
The alumni records of Rutgers University specifically show what kinds of positions
Japanese engineering students ended up occupying in Japan. For example, Zun Zow Matsmuila
(1871) became captain of the Imperial Japanese Navy after studying engineering at Rutgers and
graduating from Annapolis. Shumma Shikamime (1875) became a shipbuilder and engineer
inventor for the Japanese army. Kojiro Mutsugata (1889) became president of Kawasaki
Dockyard Co. [ref: Catalogue of the Officers and Alumni of Rutgers College by Rutgers College.
1916. Digitized 2007]
Conclusions. This contrast between Colombian and Japanese engineers show that students’
motives for coming to the US, their expectations, behaviors and curriculum selection, and their
employment upon return are dictated by economic and political conditions in their home country,
the relationship between their home country and the US at the time, students’ social origins and
class, and personal connections made abroad. Hence this contrast highlights striking differences
among each group experiences in the US. Although both groups came with the desire to help
build their new country while trying to maintain their traditional values from home, the countries
they ended up building were different.
3. Building industries and engineering education
Foreign engineers in the US are mostly invisible in historical accounts of engineering projects,
enterprises, laboratories, and corporations (e.g., Bureau of Ordinance, Sperry Co., Bell Labs, V
Bush’s lab at MIT) during first half of the 20th century. Most available histories of American
technologies do not show the activities of foreign engineers during this time perhaps due to a
number of reasons, including the increasing importance of these projects for national defense and
war, historians’ focus on institutional, professional, or biographical accounts which tend to
exclude participation of immigrant groups [cite Layton, Hughes, Cowan, Hounshell]. Another
reason might be a glass ceiling for foreign engineers, especially those who tried to make inroads
into managerial positions.
A history of Henry Ford’s lieutenants, those businessmen and engineers who closely
worked for him in the development and growth of the Ford Motor Co., might be indicative of the
representation and participation of foreign engineers in the large corporations that characterized
US industrial development in the first half of the 20th century. Of Ford’s 37 Lieutenants, there is
only a handful of first generation Americans and only 2 foreign engineers from Hungary who
received their undergraduate engineering education in their home country prior to immigrating to
the US. For example, Eugene Farkas, born in Hungary in 1881, studied mechanical engineering
at the Royal Joseph Technical University prior to coming to the US in 1906. After a number of
job stints among Detroit car companies, Farkas joined Ford in 1913 to become one of its most
innovative and risky designers but never occupying a management position. He worked on the
designs of engineering novelties such as the Edison-Ford electric car, a new Ford tractor (1915),
the engine for a robot aircraft bomb (1918), the model A chassis (1926), and a 12-cylynder radial
engine for a B24 bomber (during WWII). According to Bryan, historian of Ford’s lieutenants,
“the US government had been concerned about Ford’s hiring foreign engineers to design military
weapons.” To this concern, Ford response was “I don’t care what they are—Hungarians,
Austrian, Germans. As long as they work for me and do a good job, they are all right with me.”
[quoted in Bryan p107]. We haven’t found any other historical accounts of foreign engineers in
other companies.
Beyond these individual histories, we can look at significant political and economic
outside of the US which led groups of foreign engineers to travel to the US.
Russian engineers migrate to the US during the Bolshevik Revolution
Stephen Timoshenko’s autobiography provides a window into the experiences of many Russian
engineers that fled their country during the Bolshevik revolution. Amazingly, their teaching and
professional activities, including institutional building, did not stop during the Revolution.
Moving to Kiev after the incursion of the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg, Timoshenko and other
engineers organized the Ukraine Academy of Sciences and taught at the Kiev Polytechnic. With
the arrival of the Bolsheviks in Kiev, Timoshenko and other engineers flee to Yugoslavia
looking teaching jobs at the Polytechnic in Zagreb. Other engineers went to Poland expecting to
find jobs at the Warsaw Polytechnic [p. 209]. As Bolsheviks increased control of Russia, many
more Russian engineers arrived in Yugoslavia: “The number of Russian professors at the
Polytechnic rapidly increased. Professor of mechanical technology Savvin arrived, whom I had
known well at the Petersburg Polytechnic, also Professor Pushin, my colleague at the Institute
Electrical Engineering. Some younger Russian teachers showed up too. For instance, my pupil
and former co-worker at the Ways of Communication Institute, Chalyshev, came and replaced
my Croatian assistant. Later, after I had left for America, several more Russians arrived.” [p217]
Why the US? Throughout his difficult exile Timoshenko enjoyed the help of his engineering
pupils who, in spite of their political affiliations with the Bolsheviks, always extended their
loyalty to their professor. One of this pupils, Zelov, had migrated to the US and worked at the
Vibration Specialty Company in Philadelphia. Recognizing the need for Timoshenko’s expertise
in vibration and metal fatigue, Zelov convinced the company president, also a Russian, to extend
an offer to his former professor. “The company president, a Russian engineer named Akimov,
who was familiar with some of my writings on vibration, ought that I might be useful. On his
own, Zelov added that he liked the working conditions and was satisfied with Akimov’s attitude
toward his employees. Several days later I received an official letter from Akimov himself
offering me a job with his company. If I accepted, he would pay my way to America. He offered
me a salary of seventy-five dollars a week…Thus ended the five years of my wanderings through
Russia and Western Europe after my departure from Petersburg. Ahead lay America.” [p225-6]
America not only represented freedom for the Bolsheviks but an opportunity to apply
heavily theoretical education to specific problems now encountered in US industries. For
example, Timoshenko’s first challenge was to work on flexure and torsion problems in a gas
engine that his new company designed for the US Navy.
Experiences. In solving this problem, he came across many immigrant engineers, including those
that helped him with the writing of his textbook on crankshafts. Timoshenko wrote textbooks on
most of the problems that he encountered in US industry. Since his command of English was not
the best, he often relied on other immigrant engineers for translations and writing. During his
writing, his main challenge was to find engineering literature. “To get the books I needed for my
work and to read the technical journals, I took Akimov’s advice and went to the Franklin
Institute library. Though for technical literature this library was one of the best in the country, in
its number of journals it was poorer not only than Petersburg’s libraries but than that of the Kiev
Polytechnic, which I knew well. In foreign languages there was almost nothing. This poverty is
easy to explain. No one in Philadelphia was interested n engineering literature.” [p235]
Like many Russian engineers who migrated to the US, Timoshenko experienced
ambivalence about staying in America:
should I stay in America or go back to Yugoslavia? I definitely did not like America.
Here no one was interested in the science of engineering. In Zagreb I would be nearer the
scientific centers and could occasionally participate in scientific congresses. I could
publish my works in the best European journals. From the material standpoint, however,
the picture was different. In Yugoslavia I would live in complete penury. I wouldn’t even
have my own place to live and would be huddled with my family in those laboratory
rooms where my children were sleeping on stools and studied by lamps that hung from
the ceiling, straining their eyes. In America, it seemed, I could earn enough money or a
tolerable material existence. After long hesitation I decided to stay in America. Whether
chose rightly or wrongly, I don’t know even now, after some forty years. By remaining in
America I, of course, gained greater experience in applying scientific analysis to solving
engineering problems. [p236]
Russian engineers encountered in the US a very different, an in their eyes inferior,
engineering education. Timoshenko became so critical of American engineering education that
he left his children in Europe to study engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic Institute. “By then I
already knew that there were no good engineering schools in America.” [p237] “But in American
schools at that time they taught you mainly how to calculate, not why a calculation works.”
[p299] When Timoshenko moved to Westinghouse in Pittsburg to work on their new research
division in mechanics he realized that most theoretical engineering was being done by
Europeans: “Now some forty years later, thinking back over the reason for our achievements, I
come to the conclusion that not a small role was played by the education that we had received at
Russian engineering colleges. The thoroughness of our training in mathematics and the basic
engineering subjects gave us an enormous advantage over Americans, especially in the solving
of nonstereotyped problems…When I started at Westinghouse, I merely noticed that all the jobs
requiring any theoretical knowledge whatever were filled mainly by engineers educated in
Europe.” [p244, 248]
Contributions to the US. “Unresigned to remain a factory engineer,” Timoshenko established a
school of mechanics within Westinghouse where he taught strength of materials and elasticity to
many industry engineers and engineering professors. His ability to bring together industrial
practice and the teaching of theory attracted an impressive group of European engineers around
him. “On Sunday mornings at nine o’clock, at a designated corner, our “hiking club” assembled.
It was a small group, usually fewer than ten. The only American was J. Ormondroyd, later
mechanics professor at the University of Michigan. All the others were foreigners, from different
European countries. The Russians were I and G. Karelitz, my pupil at the Petersburg
Polytechnic, who was to become professor of applied mechanics at Columbia. A frequent
participant in the walks was J.P. Den Hartog, my very close associate at the Research Institute,
who afterwards became mechanics professor at M.I.T. Another of our hikers was Soderberg,
who also became a professor at M.I.T., and subsequently dean there. Who could have imagined
at the time that within some ten years this group of young engineers would be playing leading
roles in the development of mechanics n America?” [p257] In his last year at Westinghouse,
Timoshenko wrote a textbook on vibration of machines, organized organizing the mechanics
section of ASME, and continued teaching within the company. These activities, and his many
previous writings, granted him a job offer at the University of Michigan in 1927 where he
established an influential summer school of mechanics for engineering educators who wanted to
get a PhD in mechanics. In 1936 he moved to Stanford University where he taught until 1964
when he retired to Germany. He died in 1972.
Other Europeans academic engineers who migrated to the US from 1920-1950 included
Theodore von Karman to Caltech (1920s), Westergaard to Univ of Illinois (1914), “Karl
Terzaghi, a Hungarian who developed soil mechanics; Max Jakob brought the theory of heat
transfer from Germany to the Armour Research Institute in 1937; Boris Bakhmeteff; Max Munk;
A. L. Nádai; and Richard von Mises.” [Seely’s article footnote p. 289]
Mexican engineers build Monterrey’s industrial conglomerate
The industrial city of Monterrey in northern Mexico began developing as an industrial center
during the US Civil War when the southern states had to rely on Mexico’s manufacturing and
imports for the subsistence. This growth continued throughout the late 19th century during El
Porfiriato, three decades of political authoritarianism accompanied by large industrial
development, mainly from foreign investment [ref Haber]. Yet Mexico’s only engineering was
located in Mexico City and focused on creating engineers for mining, civil infrastructure, and
public works, not for industry. [see Lucena 2006]
When the Garza-Sada family, Monterrey’s richest and most powerful family, began
construction of Cerveceria Cuatemoc in 1890 there were no engineers in Mexico that could
develop, manage, supervise the brewing processes. They invited US engineers to occupy most
positions of technical responsibility. [Hibino p 29] In the following decade, the children of the
founders traveled to the US to study engineering, and, upon return to Monterrey, began the
Mexicanization of the brewery by hiring more and more Mexican engineers who were studying
in the US and Europe. Of this generation of technical leaders, the most influential were the
brothers Eugenio and Roberto Garza Sada who after studying engineering at MIT went back to
run the company and created the Escuela Politecnica de Cuauhtemoc inside the company to offer
technical courses and provide Mexicans with study abroad grants for technical education [Hibino
31]. For the first four decades of the 20th century, the engineers behind Monterrey’s industrial
development were, for the most part, educated in the US.
Why the US? By mid 20th century, Mexico had two exemplar schools of engineering –UNAM
and the IPN—but neither was educating engineers for private industry. Engineers from these
schools focused on executing through engineering the mandates of the Mexican Revolution
(1910) and the new constitution of 1917 to try to provide all Mexicans with water, electric, and
transportation infrastructures. With the nationalization of Mexican oil and mining and the
creation of Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), engineers from these two schools focused even more
on the exploitation and organization of natural resources. Their interested were far removed from
private industry. Engineers for private industry would have to be educated elsewhere. Realizing
that the company’s small polytechnic was not enough to produce the engineers needed for the
Monterrey’s growing industry, Eugenio Garza-Sada proposed to the Monterrey business elite the
creation of a private engineering school modeled after MIT: the Monterrey Tech which opened
in 1943.
Contributions to Mexico From the time of their graduation at MIT to the opening of the
Monterrey Tech, the Garza Sada brothers were responsible for the creation of an unsurpassed
industrial complex in Mexican history, including an entire array of companies for the horizontal
integration of beer production and sales (glass, malt, cardboard, steel, label printing, plastics,
etc). Almost all the engineers who became presidents, directors, and general managers of these
companies received engineering degrees from MIT, Texas A&M, Michigan, or Stanford [ Rojas
Sandoval p 7]. Analyzing the development of this industrial complex and the role that Mexican
engineers educated in the US played in it, Hibino states that
Dependence was also evident, and logically so, in the education and training of the
company's founders, decision makers, and inventors. To achieve international levels of
competitiveness, it is necessary to train one's workers in institutions at the cutting edge of
technological innovation. The importance of a foreign education was illustrated by the
number of innovations that coincided with the entrance of new and qualified people at
upper levels of management: the idea of using sorghum instead of corn and rice occurred
a few years after Ceballos had studied in the United States, and improvements in the
physical and chemical properties of steel sheets produced by Hylsa did not make
dramatic progress until Juan Celada [electrical engineer from MIT] joined the firm.
In the last three decades, engineers from UNAM, Mexico City’s elite engineering school,
have also traveled to the US in larger numbers but usually at a different time in their careers and
for different purposes than engineers from Monterrey. Interestingly, 10% of political elite in
Mexico are engineers (known as ‘political technocrats’), compared to 13% who are lawyers.
Because accruing key political capital in Mexico takes place during socialization in the
undergraduate years at elite universities such as UNAM, engineering students prefer to finish
their undergraduate degrees in Mexico to secure key connections, obtain graduate degrees in the
US to enhance their status, and return home to careers as political technocrats. Most of these
engineers end up running Mexico’s most powerful technical public entities such as PEMEX, the
Ministry of Public Works, Mexico’s City Metro, etc [see Camp’s article on political technocrat
in Mexico]
Fighting the Cold War for the US
German engineers develop American rocketry
Why the US? The migration of German engineers to the US began before the end of the Pacific
War when the US government recruited German engineers to help win the war against Japan.
Under secret project name “Overcast”, the US government captured and held in custody an
impressive group of rocket engineers including “Dr. Max Kramer, who designed the Fritz X, an
air-to-surface missile used in the Mediterranean as early as August 1943; Robert Lusser, the
chief engineer of the Fieseler Aircraft Company and the inventor of the V-I; Dr. Richard Vogt of
Blohm and Voss, creator of the BV-246 glide bomb; Dr. Werner Rambouske, who developed a
homing device for rockets at the Askania Works; and Dr. Richard Orthuber, director of a group
of research scientists at Neustadt-bei-Coburg working on the application of infrared cells to the
control of missiles.” At the same time, the US Air Force had in custody virtually every leading
aircraft engineer, the foremost of whom was Dr. Alexander Lipisch of Messerschmitt, designer
of the world’s first manned rocket-powered plane, the ME-163. Others included the director of
the Luftwaffe’s imposing Institute of Aeronautical Research n Munich, Dr. Franz Neugebauer;
the chief of aerodynamics at Messerschmitt, Dr. Waldemar Voigt; the director of the jet
propulsion section of the German Air Force Ministry, Helmut Schelp; the supercharger expert at
the German Experimental Institute for Flying, Dr. Werner von der Nuell; the young designer of
Heinkel-Hirth, already distinguished for his work on turbojets. Dr. Pabst von Ohain; and the
inventor of the tip-jet-powered rotor for helicopters, Friedrich Doblhoff .[Lasby p75]. Research
in these areas had flourished in Germany to unprecedented levels because, unlike other areas of
military research, rocketry and aerodynamics were not restricted by the Treaty of Versailles after
WWI. Project Overcast fell out of favor after the end of the Pacific war. The US victory over
Japan led those involved in the recruitment of German scientists and engineers to assume US
scientific and technological superiority. German scientists and engineers began leaving the US
and American zone in Germany. At the tail end of Project Overcast, only four days after
Japanese surrender, a group of German engineers arrived in the US with rocket engineer
Wemher von Braun. “The seven men, headed by Dr. Wemher von Braun, had signed a six-month
contract with the Army “to undertake such research, design, development, and other tasks
associated with jet propulsion and guided missiles as may be assigned by competent U.S.
authorities.” [p88]
The scaling up of the arrival of German engineers to the US, now under Project
Paperclip, began on September of 1946, one year after Japanese surrender, when President
Truman “gave his official sanction to what proved to be an expanded version of military and
civilian exploitation [of foreign experts].” In his executive order, the President authorized the
[US] government, lest it “endanger the national security,” [to] import as many as one
thousand German and Austrian specialists under “temporary limited military custody,”
and ensure them suitable salaries and working conditions. It should not employ ardent
Nazis, but neither would it discriminate against those who had been “nominal” party
members or who had received awards or honors under the Nazi regime...By Christmas of
1946 the number of specialists in the country had increased to 292, and the dependents of
approximately twenty of them had already moved into the barracks-style “homes” on the
military posts.[Lasby p178]
Demographics, origins, and destinations. There was competition among the branches of the
military for the recruitment of German specialists. While the Army imported 210 Paperclip
specialists, the USAF brought 260. The group of Paperclip specialists were mainly, but not
exclusively, German engineers or very high caliber. “Yet the Paperclip specialists, as an
immigrant group, were unlike any previous newcomers. Their numbers were small, comprising
hardly a ripple when viewed against the sea of historical migration. They were also remarkably
homogeneous. The places of birth of the 475 who were in the United States m early 1948 were as
follows: Germany, 428; Austria, 16; Czechoslovakia, 7; Poland and Russia, 5; Switzerland,
Estonia, and the Free State of Danzig, 3; Hungary, 2; Belgium, Italy, and Yugoslavia, 1.” [Lasby
p270]
The group of the first 150 specialists contracted in Europe provides a snapshot of the
academic status and seniority level of Paperclip engineers: “10 were listed as professors and
doctors, 33 as senior doctor engineer, 44 as junior doctor engineer, 45 as engineer, 28 as skilled
laborer or master mechanic.” [ Lasby p. 259] “Taken as a whole, the group’s level of education
and degree of skill were unprecedented in the chronicles of immigration.” [Lasby p271] The
most prominent engineers who came after Von Braum included Dr. Hans Mayer, a director of
the Siemens and Halske research laboratories; Dr. Ernst Eckert and Dr. Henry Schmitt, fighterengine specialists; Dr. Theodore Zobel, aerodynamicist of the Hermann Goering Institute; Drs.
Rudolph Hermann, Emst Steinhoff, and Martin Schilling, all from the V-2 project; and Fritz
Doblhoff, inventor of a jet-propelled helicopter; Dr. Alexander Lippisch, designer of the ME163; Dr. Anselm Franz, a director at the Dessau Aircraft Company; Dr. Philip von Doepp, a wind
tunnel specialist from Junkers Aircraft; Theodor Knacke, a parachute expert; Eugene
Ryschkewitsch, an eminent ceramics engineer; Dr. Rolf Ammann of the Bavarian Motor Works;
Dr. Gottfried Guderley, a leading aerodynamicist; and Dr. Bemhard Goethert, a wind tunnel
specialist [Lasby p187]
Following the advice of Professor Theodore von Karman, a Hungarian Jew who in 1929
had left the directorship of the Aeronautical Institute of Aachen, Germany, to assume the
leadership of the Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech, the US government located German
engineers in military, industrial and academic settings. The main military location was the
Army’s Ordinance Department in Ft Bliss, Texas. But by 1949 a significant number had been
placed at “at three educational institutions—Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University,
and North Carolina State and at numerous companies—RCA., Bausch & Lomb, AVCO
Manufacturing, Graflex, Heintz Manufacturing, Hydrocarbon Research, North American
Aviation, Blaw-Knox, Pry manufacturing, and Dow Chemical. [Lasby p234]
Experiences. Apparently, the decision to work in the US was easy for most since Germany was
in ruins after the war. One German engineer described his plight after the war and his decision to
come to the US as follows: “I could find a job only as an unskilled laborer with a vegetable
gardener. One days pay could buy just a few cigarettes on the black market. I could not find
work as a mechanical engineer, what I am from profession [sic]. Therefore I followed gladly an
invitation of the American government to come to this country to work in my profession.”
[quoted in Lasby p274] Another explained how he arrived at the same conclusion: “Knowing the
Communistic philosophies to be unacceptable, I decided to make myself, i.e., my engineering
capabilities, available to the preservation of a strong “Western World.” Accepting the contract
offered by the U.S. War Department under Operation Paperclip appeared a good possibility to do
so.” [quoted in Lasby p277]
Once in the US their presence elicited great controversy among American engineers. For
example, the presence of German engineers in American universities produced great resentment
and disgust among US professors who protested the presence of and extension of privileges to
former Nazis on their campuses. Lasby analyzes this sentiment stating that “What [US] officials
overlooked was that Overcast had a certain elementary appeal that defied criticism: after an
extremely costly war [in Europe], which had little promise of reparations, the nation could
benefit from the temporary use of German talent….Paperclip had no such virtue, and the virtuous
showed no tolerance. Alarmed particularly by the offer of citizenship to “enemy aliens,” men of
different persuasions—scientists, clergymen, educators—set forth a scathing and consentient
indictment.” [Lasby p191]
In spite of eliciting resentment, most Paperclip engineers decided to stay in the US and
forged identities closely related to their projects, including the US space race. According to
Lasby, “approximately 550, or 85 percent, of the total group of Paperclip specialists elected to
become lifelong citizens. Many of them never seriously considered returning to Germany simply
because they preferred to live in America.” [p 293] A university professor wrote regarding
possible return to Europe: “Never. Not for a moment. I feel at home here; my children, my
friends, my interests are in this country. Visits to Europe have strengthened the feeling that, by
now, I would be a stranger there.” [quoted in Lasby p293] [also check Noble Religion of
Technology for testimonials by Von Braum]
Impact on US. Before their most visible contributions in the Mercury and Apollo programs,
Paperclip engineers had made significant contributions to US science and engineering. “By 1960,
126 of the total group had attained the distinction of being listed in American Men of Science.
The contributions of the “study group”—30 books, 1,260 articles, 1,315 unclassified technical
reports, and 734 patent applications—also attest to a remarkably high degree of occupational
adjustment.” [Lasby p288]. According to Lasby, a more significant contribution of these
engineers was to help tip the balance of power during the Cold War in favor of the US. Lasby
reports that when Stalin learned that his soldiers had not captured a single foremost rocket
expert, he wrote to his Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs for Counterintelligence “This is
absolutely intolerable…We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemunde; but the
Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How
and why was this allowed to happen?” [Lasby p297]
Immigration Act of 1952
After WWII, US Congress passed a new immigration law aimed at reuniting families of US
citizens. This new law benefited immigrants from European countries more than others as
refugees throughout Europe could now be reunited with their American relatives. According to
scholar of high tech immigrants Rafael Alarcon, “Since 1952 when Congress passed the
Immigration and Nationality Act, legal immigration to the United States has been based on two
cornerstones: family reunification and occupational qualifications. The INA basically continued
[in 1952] the national origins system of the 1920s but also made major changes. The novelty was
that INA made all races eligible for naturalization. The act also established a preference system
that basically subsists today which favors family reunification. It granted first preference to the
immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and legal residents. Skilled and unskilled workers in certain
occupational categories were also eligible to enter the United States.” [Alarcon 2000 p 2]
The inclusion of “occupational category” in the 1952 law challenged NSF to collect data
on foreign scientists and engineers in the US. Hundreds of reports on migration to the US had
appeared in the first half of the 20th century, but prior 1952 there was no systematic information
on the precise numbers of scientists and engineers among immigrants. The systematic collection
of data was accompanied by key conceptual developments. First, NSF reports began to
differentiate “immigrant” from “non-immigrant.” The former refers to those who came to the US
with a permanent visa, eventually becoming residents and/or citizens. The latter refers to
“workers of distinguished merit and ability, workers performing services unavailable in the
United States, industrial trainees, exchange visitors, and students” who did not have the intention
to stay in the US permanently. Also ‘engineers’ become a statistical category different from
other foreign professionals such as scientists. The new data also showed a picture of immigrant
engineers larger than the ones presented from historical accounts of specific groups such as
Paperclip specialists or biographical accounts such as Timoshenko’s. Aggregate data now
showed how immigration of engineers to the US related to specific events in home countries that
affected demographic groups where engineers come from. It also showed how immigration was
facilitated by legislative amendments which not always corresponded to US skilled labor needs.
For example, Indonesian independence (1949) and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution
(1956) led to two immigration “humanitarian” amendments by US Congress favoring Dutch and
Hungarian immigrants respectively, including engineers. Tracking the impact of these events on
US s&e ‘manpower’, NSF data showed, for example, that of the approximately 200,000
Hungarians who fled after the revolution, 38,045 reached the United States by1958, 568 were
scientists and engineers, and 437 of these (77%) were engineers. Furthermore, NSF began paying
attention to the educational background of immigrant engineers and potential funding for their
education in the US. Reporting on the quality of Hungarian engineers, NSF stated that “The
major technical universities of Hungary provide a high level of training in an atmosphere of
fairly rigorous intellectual discipline. A perusal of the syllabi of the Polytechnical University of
Budapest, for example, reveals that the undergraduate in science is expected to cover a greater
amount of subject matter in mathematics and foreign languages than that generally required in
comparable institutions in the United States.” [NSF 62-24 p8] Many Hungarian, Canadian, and
other European engineers in the late 1950s financed their graduate education in the US through
the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 after Sputnik. [NSF 62-24 p8]
Canadian engineers for the space program
Why the US? The combined effect of Paperclip, new immigration laws and amendments, and the
demand for engineers prompted by the space race made engineers to be approx 75% of total s&e
immigrants in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Canadian, British and German engineers,
respectively, had the largest representations among foreign engineers in the 1950s and early
1960s. When Canada cancelled its plans to send rockets to the moon, known as the Avro Arrow
program, NASA launched its Mercury program, selecting McDonnell Aircraft of St Louis to
build the new spacecraft. Facing massive layoffs, Avro engineers took matters in their own hands
and began promoting their skills at NASA headquarters and the Canadian embassy in DC [
Gainor p36] NASA quickly approved the hiring of “research and development group of alien
scientists having special qualifications in fields closely related to manned space flight.” [quoted
in p39] Twenty-five AVRO engineers were hired after obtaining security clearances “because
Project Mercury was a top priority effort involving missiles that were at the heart of the nation’s
defences.” [Gainor p39]
Contributions. These engineers were assigned to positions of great responsibility and technical
complexity, including engineering procedures for trainer and flight simulator, designing the
control center at Cape Canaveral, capsule control system, aerodynamic heating analysis and reentry dynamics, among others [Gainor p44]. James Chamberlain (1915-1992), who studied
mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto and Imperial College in London, quickly
became head of engineering for Project mercury. As first project manager for Gemini, he
designed the spacecraft [Gainor p271] After joining NASA in 1959 to work on Mecury, Owen
Maynard (1924-2000), an aeronautical engineer from the University of Toronto, “was the first
person in NASA to begin working on the design of the lunar module.” In 1964 he became chief
of systems engineering in the Apollo program. Then in 1966-67 he was chief of mission
operations and organized setting the requirements for the Apollo lunar landing. “The other Avro
engineers made their contributions to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo as well, and their handiwork
can be found in Skylab, the shuttle and the International Space Station. Avro engineers made
their mark in building the ground and now satellite networks that Keep the Earth in touch with
spacecraft.” [Gainor p268]
Contrasting the contributions of German and Canadian engineers to the US space
program, Gainor explains the relative invisibility of Canadian engineers as follows
The best-known group of foreign engineers that worked for NASA was the team of 118
German engineers who came to the U.S. after World War II under the leadership of
Wemher von Braun. After 14 years working for the U.S. Army, most of that group
followed von Braun to NASA…Because the Germans were concentrated in one place,
their legacy to Apollo is easy to see: the Saturn rockets that propelled Apollo into orbit
and to the Moon. Because the Avro engineers were spread out in NASA, their own
legacy hasn’t been seen as clearly.”[Gainor p268]
[Source: Gainor, Chris Arrows to the Moon: Avro’s engineers and the space race ]
Engineering students from Latin America
Not all students coming to US came under the auspices of the space race. As part of its Cold War
foreign policy, the US developed an alliance for progress with Latin America which served as an
umbrella for technical exchange. Created and sponsored under this context in the late 1950s, the
Pan-American Union of Engineers (UPADI) sponsored the First Pan-American Congress on
Engineering Education in 1960 where student exchanges across the Americas became on the key
discussion topics. From a total of 13, 937 students coming to the US from Pan-American
countries in the years 1958-59, 25% studied engineering, the discipline with the largest
representation. The main countries of origin of these engineers were Canada (911), Cuba (697),
Venezuela (482), Colombia (276) and Mexico (246).
Immigration Act of 1965
The early 1960s show a decline in the percentage of engineers from Western European countries,
probably due to the normalization of higher education activities after reconstruction, and an
increase of engineers from countries undergoing political change such as Cuba. [see chart for
engineers immigrants from 1957 to 1961 vs. country of last residence to show declines from
most Western European countries] In the early 1960s, engineers made 67% among all foreign
s&e. Electrical engineers was the largest group among them (1,600), followed by civil (1,200)
and mechanical (1,100). The total number of immigrant s&e was equivalent to 3% of US
graduates in similar fields [NSF 67-3]
The influence of the Immigration Act of 1952, particularly its family reunification clause,
began to decline in the early 1960s. More often, foreign engineers came under provisions made
for special occupational categories. Only 10% of s&e in the years 1962-64 came under family
reunification quotas. The rest came under occupational categories or provisions made outside the
1952 law since this law restricted the number of immigrants from each country. Yet with the
highest proportion (~70%) among all immigrant s&e, engineering surprisingly accounted for less
than 10% of the foreign scholars (547 out of 6,541 in 1963-4) and less that 25% of foreign
students. However, most of the foreign students obtaining PhDs in the US in the early 1960s
were engineers from Asia, mainly from India and Taiwan. In short, foreign engineers came to the
US mainly to work or get PhDs, not so much to teach or obtain undergraduate degrees.
With the origins of immigrant professionals shifting from Europe to other parts of the
world and more professional coming under special provisions beyond the 1952 law, a new
immigration law was introduced in 1965. Alarcon summarizes the overall aim and impact of the
new law as follows:
In 1965, the INA was substantially amended in key provisions under the pressure of the
civil rights movement. The new act abolished the national origins quota system
established in the 1920s, eliminating national origin, race or ancestry as a basis for
immigration to the United States. This led to a more diversified pool of immigrants from
regions in the world other than Europe. However, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality
Act (also mown as the Hart-Celler Act) maintained the principle of numerical restriction,
limiting Eastern Hemisphere immigration to 170,000 and placing for the first time a
ceiling on Western Hemisphere immigration of 120,000. This legislation also set a per
country limit of 20,000. The act also established a seven-category preference system for
relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to reunify families and for persons with
special occupational skills to meet labor market needs in the United States. [Alarcon p2]
The 1965 law had significant impact on the number of engineering students and scholars coming
from Asia. The increasing demand for engineers, mainly for the space program and other related
projects (e.g., Boeing STS), and the decline of Western European immigrants in the 1960s
prompted a reallocation of quotas that favored Asian immigrant engineers from China (first from
Taiwan and more recently from mainland China) and India. According to AnnaLee Saxenian, a
political scientist that specializes on the impact of immigrants on US regional innovation,
“[b]efore 1965, the U.S. immigration system limited foreign entry by mandating extremely small
quotas according to nation of origin. Hart-Cellar [1965 Immigration Law], by contrast, allowed
immigration based on both the possession of scarce skills and on family ties to citizens or
permanent residents. It also significantly increased the total number of immigrants allowed into
the United States. For example, Taiwan, like most other Asian countries, was historically limited
to a maximum of 100 immigrant visas per year. As a result, only 47 scientists and engineers
immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1965. Two years later, the number had increased
to 1,321” [Saxenian p10]. In short time immigrant s&e came to be 30% of the total S&E
workforce in the period 1965-69, up from 6% in 1950-54. Engineering continued to have the
largest representation among all immigrant S&E, with 70% by the end of the 1960s. [NSF 72312]. Another key conceptual development took place when NSF began reporting data of
immigrant s&e by sex. Interestingly, this reporting by sex precedes any domestic concern about
‘women in science and engineering’ who became a significant statistical category with the
Science and Technology Equal Opportunity Act of 1980. [Lucena chap 3]
Origins and Destinations. The main places of origin of the 12,000 foreign graduate engineering
students in the US (1968) were India (3077), China (2091), Western Europe (781), Middle East
(741), South America (469). The main academic destinations were MIT (889), UC-Berkeley
(638), Stanford (426), NYU (308), U of Michigan (302), Stevens Institute of Technology (299),
Purdue (257), U of Washington (221), Illinois Inst of Tech (207), U of Minnesota (204), Georgia
Tech (189), UCLA (187), U Penn (184), Michigan State (169), Columbia U (168), Lehigh U
(164) and U of Missouri Rolla (155) [Source: Survey of Foreign Graduate Students Enrolled in
Engineering Curricula in the United States Fall 1968 Engineers Joint Council. Engineering
Manpower Commission.]
Building economic competitiveness
No place in the pipeline
National worries about US economic competitiveness, particularly with Japan, translated into
policies and programs to recruit and retain US students in s&e. As the number of white males in
these fields declined, the attention of policymakers and educators turned to groups who had been
historically underrepresented in s&e, mainly US women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and
Native Americas. Engineering policymakers used a ‘pipeline’ as a metaphor to conceptualize the
problem of recruitment and retention in s&e. The pipeline was conceived as a continuous flow
model from K to PhD, with no consideration for those who might ‘leak’ early to work in industry
or might ‘plug in’ temporarily such as foreign engineering students or professionals. What
mattered was to keep a continuous flow of students from high-school through college, hopefully
to the PhD. Hence foreign students were never conceived as a group that could significantly
contribute to the US s&e pipeline even when their impact on s&e, particularly in graduate
education and research activities, was widely recognized by the end of the 1990s [see The Impact
of Foreign Graduate Students on Engineering Education in the United States by ELINOR G.
BARBER and ROBERT P. MORGAN in Science 3 April 1987: Vol. 236. no. 4797, pp. 33 – 37]
Since foreign graduate students in s&e were not viewed as contributing to the pipeline,
attracting them has not been a priority in US educational policy even after Australia and the
European Union began to actively attract and retain in the late 1990s, efforts that coincided with
hostility by US immigration policy after 9/11 to foreign students particularly those from Asia and
the Middle East. Yet engineering educators, especially those responsible for research activities,
recognized that graduate education and research could not function without foreign graduate
students and began to worry about the aftermath of post-9/11 immigration policy. As reported by
ASEE Prism in 2005
In 2003-04, the number of foreign students at U.S. colleges fell by 2.4 percent, the first
drop in 32 years, according to Open Doors, an annual report on foreign-student
enrollment published by the Institute of International Education. Nowhere is the decline
more pronounced than in graduate programs. About half of the 400,000 foreign students
who come to the United States enroll in graduate school. Foreign graduate applications
declined by 28 percent between the fall of 2003 and the fall of 2004. The number of
students applying from China alone plunged 45 percent. India dropped by 28 percent.
Those two countries supply a little more than a third of the graduate students in the
United States. By far, the hardest hit programs are those in engineering…The greatest
concern to people like Law and others [engineering deans] is what this all could mean for
the future of U.S. dominance in scientific fields. This is especially acute in engineering, a
field in which foreign students account for 55 percent of all Ph.D. candidates. Foreign
students have long provided the pool of research assistants for university laboratories,
usually helping to do basic research for government contracts. After graduation, the
students often stay in the United States to take positions in academe or private industry. If
foreign students do not come to the United States to study, university research could
suffer and, more important, the American economy… [ref Selingo, Jeffrey. Difficult
Crossings: FEWER FOREIGN GRAD STUDENTS ARE MAKING THE EFFORT,
POST 9/11, TO APPLY TO U.S. SCHOOLS. Prism Feb 2005 vol 14, n6]
Recently, the number of foreign engineering students seems to be slightly increasing (0.8 % in
2006 after a 4.8% drop in 2005) [ref McCormak Eugene, Number of Foreign Students Bounces
Back to Near-Record High. Chronicle Nov 16, 2007] but competition to attract them continues
from countries that witness a decline in their domestic enrollments [ref: McCormak Eugene.
Worldwide Competition for International Students Heats Up. Chronicle Nov 16, 2007]
Similarly, policymakers could not see how foreign practicing engineers could contribute
to a model that emphasized PhD completion. A former director of NSF’s Division of Research,
Evaluation, and Dissemination (RED), who tried to change the ways in which NSF viewed the
pipeline, explained its limitations: “the pipeline metaphor is not a very useful metaphor...because
it restricts at various entry points and there aren't too many of them. There are still more people
flowing out than people flowing in. It restricts the pool of people who could eventually go on and
take degrees in science and engineering.” [quoted in Lucena] In short, as temporary in- and
outflows, foreign engineering students and professionals did not fit the pipeline metaphor.
While higher education focused on recruitment and retention of US women and
minorities and benefited from the pipeline by receiving funding to implement recruitment
programs since the late 1980s, industries and businesses pressured US Congress and President
Bush to pass the Immigration Law of 1990 to increase the number of immigrant professionals.
“In 1990 the U.S. Congress addressed the question about the human capital of the immigrants
and its consequences for the global competitiveness of the United States by favoring the
immigration of professionals and by emphasizing the skills of new immigrants.” [Alarcon 2000,
p2] Foreign engineers were particularly favored by the new law. “The Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1990 further favored the immigration of engineers by almost tripling the
number of visas granted on the basis of occupational skills from 54,000 to 140,000 annually.”
[Saxexian p10] Ironically, conceived as a law to help US economic competitiveness, the
Immigration Act of 1990 further benefited skilled immigrants from Asia by allowing many of
them to become permanent US residents based on employed-based preference. Of the total
immigrants from China, for example, 57% became permanent residents as a result of
employment visas. The percentage for Russians was 93%, Canadians 83%, British 81%, Koreans
55%, Taiwanese 54%, Salvadoreans 43&, Asian Indians 39%, and Mexicans 24%. [Ibid] As
foreign engineers become permanent immigrants, their contributions to the US economy are
evident yet complex. Their activities in the US create networks of people, knowledge and capital
that transcend national boundaries, making almost impossible to pinpoint where the extent of
their full contributions will reside.
Indian and Chinese engineers in the US West
Origins and demographics In 2003, there were 515,000 Indian and 326,000 Chinese scientists
and engineers in the US [NSF 07-324]. Disproportionate representation of Chinese and Indian
engineers in reports and research projects on highly skilled immigrants reflect broader national
trends. According to Saxenian, “Foreign-born engineers and computer scientists in the United
States are significantly more likely to come from India, Taiwan, or China than from other Asian
nations. Moreover, these trends are of particular importance to California. Data collected by the
INS show that more than one-third (36 %) of Asian immigrants engineers entering the US report
that they intend to live either in the San Francisco or the Los Angeles areas” [p 12-13]. Among
Chinese engineers, there has been a historic shift of immigrants from Taiwan to those from
mainland China. “The Chinese engineering workforce in Silicon Valley was dominated by
Taiwanese immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1960s, there were very few Chinese
technology workers in the region, and they came almost exclusively from China and Hong Kong.
In the two subsequent decades, by contrast, more than one-third of the region’s Chinese
immigrant engineers were of Taiwanese origin…Immigrants from Mainland China were a
growing presence in Silicon Valley’s technology workforce in the 1980s—a trend that
accelerated dramatically during the 1990s.” [Saxenian p14]
Why the US? Indian engineers come to the US to be close to cutting edge research and education,
enhance their status, and follow a career path that they have come to deem natural, logical and
culturally appropriate. As Roli Varma found out,
Most of these respondents [Indian engineers] wanted to go to “cutting-edge” schools for
graduate degrees, and the United States offered the best educational system. They felt
that after earning a master’s degree in India in a science or engineering field, coming to
the United States was the natural thing to do. As one academia respondent reported, it is
“culturally appropriate.” The dominant trend was and still is that “the best students go to
America.” These respondents never considered any other place. According to them, the
United Kingdom was the traditional place to go for higher education in S&E; however,
after World war American schools became the prestigious destination. The United States
was the place “where things were happening in S&E fields and they still are.”
Immigration to the United States for higher education in S&E has since been glorified as
the most prestigious choice. [Varma p. 35]
One of her respondents put it this way
At that time, I wanted to do a Ph.D. And where is a better place to do a Ph.D. than the
United States? You do a master in mechanical engineering from IIT, the best place in
India, and the next logical step is you go to the United States. So, I do not think it was, at
least from my part, a very conscious move, but it was the thing to do. And since I also got
admission to a good school, there was no doubt about going there. [An industry
respondent quoted in Varma p35]
For the Chinese, there is a strong connection between becoming an engineer and coming to the
US. Historically, scientific and technological careers have been emphasized in China as key
elements of the country’s modernization since the May Fourth Movement (1919), in the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, and during recent economic reforms. In the eyes of the
government, engineering is both more ideologically safe and more worthy of government
support than, for example, social sciences and humanities [Wong 2006, p81-82]. Hence more
students find engineering a historically prestigious, safer, more promising, and better supported
career choice. After finishing their undergraduate careers in China, students seek graduate
opportunities in China and elsewhere, including the US. Chinese engineers have come to the US
in five different waves, according to destination and occupation. According to Wong, the largest
groups of Chinese engineers came to work in large companies like IBM, Intel, and Fairchild in
the 1950s, in California’s defense industry in the 1960s, as a first wave of graduate students in
the 1970s, in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again as a second wave of
graduate students in the last decade. [Wong p21]
Experiences. Large numbers of these immigrant engineers are highly educated. Among all Indian
engineers in Silicon Valley area 55% have a masters degree or above. The percentage is 40% for
Chinese and only 18% for white US engineers. Yet their experiences in climbing organizational
ladders show a glass ceiling. Only 15% of Indian engineers in Silicon Valley (1990) occupy
managerial positions. The percentages are 16% for Chinese and 26% for whites. According to
Saxenian, “Many Chinese and Indians in Silicon Valley believe that there is a “glass ceiling”
inhibiting their professional advancement. This perception is consistent with the finding that in
technology industry at least, Chinese and Indians remain concentrated in professional rather than
managerial positions, despite superior levels of educational attainment…those surveyed
attributed these limitations less to “racial prejudice and stereotypes” than to the perception of an
“old boys’ network that excludes Asians” and the lack of role models.” [p19-20]
Many older Chinese immigrant engineers started in traditional high tech corporations like
Xerox and HP in the 1970s and 1980s. After experiencing exclusion from corporate social
structures, they started their own high-tech businesses, hiring younger generations of immigrant
engineers, raising venture capital and becoming community leaders. Writing about the
experiences of three Chinese engineers who migrated in the 1970s, Saxenian reports that
Lee became the region’s first Chinese entrepreneur when he left Ampex in 1970 to start a
company called Recortec. Other early Chinese engineers report that they felt as if they
were seen as “good work horses, and not race horses” or “good technicians, rather than
managers.” David Lee, for example, left Xerox in 1973 to start Qume after a lessexperienced outsider was hired as his boss. Lee was able to raise startup capital from the
mainstream venture capital community, but only on the condition that he hire a nonAsian president for his company. David Lam similarly left Hewlett-Packard in 1979 after
being passed over for a promotion and started a semiconductor equipment manufacturing
business called Lam Research, which is now a publicly traded company with $1.3 billion
in sales. Not surprisingly, these three have become community leaders and role models
for subsequent generations of Chinese entrepreneurs.” [Saxenian p21]
Ironically, exclusion from large corporations created a form of entrepreneurship by Chinese and
Indian engineers that has become exemplar among engineers in the US.
The experiences of Indian engineers have also been filled with irony and contradiction.
Like most immigrants to the US, Indian engineers experience both negative and positive
stereotyping. Negative stereotyping of Indian engineers includes being incapable of assimilation
(“staying ethic”), incapable of leadership since most characteristics associated with leadership in
the US refer to assertive individualism, “poor communicators” and “culturally exotic.” Positive
stereotypes include being “brainy”, “non-stop workers”, and “obedient employers” [Varma chap
5] According to Varma,
Interview respondents (67%) most frequently reported that Asian Indian immigrant
scientists and engineers are perceived to be smart because they are well educated,
intelligent, articulate, mathematically minded, analytical, good at diagnosing technical
problems, and able to solve such problems very quickly. One national laboratory
respondent said, “People think that [Asian] Indians are articulate and intelligent. … In
general, they are smart; they are good at science and math.” Asian Indian scientists and
engineers attributed such qualities to the Indian educational system, which has very high
standards and trains students to digest and retain tremendous amounts of detailed
information. As one academia respondent noted, “[Asian] Indians have very good
fundamentals in their line of study. Which they acquired from India. … The level of
education is clearly at a very high standard. The foundation is laid very well for [Asian]
Indians in India.” [Varma p72]
Yet Asian Indian engineers experience income inequalities, longer times to promotion, and lower
status vis-à-vis their white peers. Among Varma’s respondents 57% reported to be paid the same
as their non-Indian peers while 15% reported to be paid less. Higher percentages of those
reporting being paid less are found among female Indian engineers (50%) and those returning to
India (25%). 34% of her respondents reported to have longer times to promotion than their peers
while 30% reported the existence of a glass ceiling for them [Varma chap 6] As one of her
respondents puts it:
I have seen a lot of technically competent and administratively capable [Asian] Indian
scientists and engineers not being able to reach the kind of heights that even average
White people do. I have seen many cases where people with lesser skills have been
promoted over more competent, savvy [Asian] Indians. … If there are symbolic
promotions for [Asian] Indians, they are at the first level of management, and nothing
beyond that…. I think it is a problem more of bias rather than lack of management skills.
[An industry respondent quoted in Varma p93]
Strategies. Chinese and Indian engineers have relied primarily on social networks to support and
enhance their entrepreneurial activities. According to Saxenian, “Silicon Valley immigrant
entrepreneurs rely on a diverse range of informal social structures and institutions to support
their entrepreneurial activities…[including] local social and professional networks to mobilize
the information, know-how, skill, and capital needed to start technology firms.” [p31] Chinese
engineers have relied on and organized professional organizations in larger numbers than Indian
engineers. These professional organizations have included the Chinese Institute of Engineers,
“the grandfather of the Chinese Associations” (ca. 1979), the Silicon valley Chinese Engineers
Association (ca. 1989), and the North America Taiwanese Engineers Association (ca. 1991),
among others. According to Saxenian, “these organizations combine elements of traditional
immigrant culture with distinctly high-technology practices: They simultaneously create ethnic
identities within the region and facilitate the professional networking and information exchange
that aid success in the highly mobile Silicon Valley economy.” [p31]
There are significant differences among these organizations, even within those created by
Chinese engineers. Accoridng to Saxenian
It is notable that the region’s Chinese and Indian immigrants have organized separately
from one another. They also join the mainstream organizations [such as IEEE], to be
sure, but appear to be less active in these than they are in the ethnic associations. There is
virtually no overlap in the membership of Indian and Chinese professional associations,
although there appears to be considerable overlap within the separate communities,
particularly the Chinese, with its multiplicity of differently specialized associations. Yet
there are also ethnic distinctions within the Chinese technology community. The Monte
Jade Science and Technology Association and the North American Taiwanese Engineers
Association, for example, use Mandarin (Chinese) at many meetings and social events—
which excludes not only non-Chinese members, but even Chinese from Hong Kong or
Southeast Asia who speak Cantonese. [Saxenian p31]
Besides providing support for enterprises, these organizations serve many other key functions
that contribute to immigrant engineers’ permanence in the US. According to Saxenian,
In spite of the distinct ethnic subcultures and the greater number in specialization of the
Chinese associations, these associations share important functions as well. All mix
socializing—over Chinese banquets, Indian dinners, or family-centered social events—
with support for professional and technical advancement. Each organization, either
explicitly or informally, provides first-generation immigrants with a source of
professional contacts and networks within the local technical community: They serve as
important sources of labor market information and recruitment channels and they provide
role models of successful immigrant entrepreneurs and managers. In addition, the
associations sponsor regular speakers and conferences that provide forums for sharing
specialized technical and market information as well as basic information about the nuts
and bolts of entrepreneurship and management for engineers with limited business
experience. In addition providing sessions on how to write a business plan or manage a
business, some of the Chinese associations give seminars on English communication,
negotiation skills, and stress management. [Saxenian p32]
Among Chinese and Indian engineering entrepreneurs, there are significant differences in the
focus of their new enterprises. Chinese emphasize more computer and electronic hardware
manufacturing while Indian focus more on software and business services. [p 25]
Contributions. Besides thousands of patents, technical papers and books, and business
enterprises, these immigrants, through their networks, make often unrecognized contributions to
the global economy and US higher education. For example, these networks provide an immigrant
engineers with an advantage over their US peers and create transnational communities and flows
of people, knowledge and capital.
The region’s Chinese engineers constructed a vibrant two-way bridge connecting the
technology communities in Silicon Valley and Taiwan; their Indian counterparts became key
middleman linking US business to low-cost software expertise in India. These cross-Pacific
networks represent more than an additional ‘ethnic resource’ that supports entrepreneurial
success; rather, they provide the region’s skilled immigrants with an important advantage
over their mainstream competitors who often lack the language skills, cultural know-how,
and contracts to build business relationships in Asia...[these] professional and social
networks span national boundaries and facilitate flows of capital, skill, and technology. In so
doing, they are creating transnational communities that provide the shared information,
contacts, and trust that allow local producers to participate in an increasingly global
economy… They are creating social structures that enable even the smallest producers to
locate and maintain mutually beneficial collaborations across long distances and that
facilitate access to Asian sources of capital, manufacturing capabilities, skills, and markets.
[Saxenian p53-55]
In addition, the presence of large numbers of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers has
been regarded as contributing to maintaining the status quo of US higher education. According to
David North, author of Soothing the Establishment: The Impact of Foreign-Born Scientists and
Engineers on America,
The presence in the U.S. of large numbers of talented and hardworking foreign-born
scientists and engineers has been very soothing to the American Establishment. It has
prevented the establishment from having to pay serious attention to a number of painful
issues, such as the distribution of income between scientific and managerial dent, and
between science and engineering workers on one hand and stockholders and taxpayers on
the other. The presence of this talent has dampened the pressure to make major reforms in
K-12 science and engineering education and has eased, if not eliminated, the pressure to
recruit American women and American Blacks for science and engineering careers.
(Although we have little hard supporting evidence, our suspicion is that white American
males are more comfortable working with male foreign-born S/Es than they are with
native-born women or Blacks, who are frequently more assertive about their rights than
the foreign born. [North (1995) p121]
[Note: we might want to introduce Lisa Hoffman’s controversial concept of “Patriotic
Professionalism” to refer to Chinese engineers desire to go back and help their country]
Japanese engineers in the US South
Demographics. In 2003, there were 46,000 Japanese s&e in the US. Compared to 515,000
Indian, 326,000 Chinese, 304,000 Philippinos, 120,000 from Koreans, 120,000 Taiwanese, and
97,000 Vietnamese, the number of Japanese s&e is fairly small. [NSF 07-324] Instead of
studying in US graduate schools in large numbers or expanding high-tech social networks as
Chinese and Indian engineers have done, Japanese engineers come to work in very specific US
locations where Japanese investment has materialized in high tech work.
Why the US? The flow of Japanese engineers into the US in the 1980s was partly due to foreign
investment by Japanese auto industry in the US. Beginning in the late 1970s with a concerted
effort by President Carter and many governors to attract Japanese investment to the US, the
temporary immigration of Japanese engineers into the US South followed major Japanese auto
manufacturers to Ohio (Honda), Kentucky (Toyota), and Tennessee (Nissan). By 1994, the main
destinations also included Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama,
Lousiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. 63% of all Japanese manufacturing affiliates are located in
the US South [Kim 1995 p 42-46] J “To cite a specific sector, as of 2006, Japan Automotive
Manufacturing Association (JAMA) members had invested some $30.99 billion in more than 28
manufacturing and parts facilities in the United States.” [ref: U.S.-Japan Economic Partnership
for Growth. July 2008. http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rpt/2008/106487.htm#ftn22] Japan is
second only to Britain in FDI in the US.
Experiences. The experiences of Japanese engineers in the US are very different than those of
Chinese and Indian engineers, mainly because of the short stay of the Japanese in the US.
Japanese experiences are more immediate and highly influenced by continuous culture shock. An
engineering manager at a Japanese automobile company in Tennessee expressed his ambivalence
about the US, being uncomfortable here yet wanting to take the US with him after a short stay:
These Tennessee people are wonderful. They’re nice, kind, and friendly. But, because of
my language handicap, I just couldn’t mingle with them well. Some Americans criticize
us for always sticking together, rather than mingling with Americans. Look, believe me I
tried very hard to do that. But, when I sit with Americans, we don’t have many subjects
in common to talk about. Commenting about the recent weather wouldn’t take more than
a few seconds….When I go to a party—with several bags of potato chips and cans of
beer—I have the impression that Americans who come to the party are more
uncomfortable than I am. They say, “Hi,” and exchange a few words of greeting, and
then leave me alone….I’m so glad I’m going back to the place where I belong. I’d like to
have a good drinking session with my old friends and talk in the Japanese language as
loudly as I can. I missed it very much. Forgive me for my ill manner, but I can’t hide my
happiness. I regret one thing. I wish I could take the U.S. with me to Japan.” [quoted in
Kim p91]
Another Japanese engineer expressed his fears of becoming obsolete in technical knowledge by
staying longer in the US:
Before I came to the United States, I worried about everything. At first, was really
“thrown” in a new world, but my wife and I with two little kids are doing much better
than we had originally anticipated, thanks to many good Americans [meaning
Tennesseans]. In fact, although it is very hard to believe, I am beginning to like it here
and am getting used to the American ways of life. But, as an engineer, I worry about
keeping p with the new technology that is developing in Japan virtually every minute.
Changes in technology, skill, and techniques are so rapid in Japan that, while I am
working with the techniques that I acquired when was in Japan, they might be already
outdated or obsolete. When I return to Japan, I’ll be behind my colleagues there. To
overcome such a lag, I keep in constant touch with my colleagues in Japan either by
telephone or fax. I use fax regularly, at least once a month. [quoted in Kim p94-95]
Kim accurately points to the irony of this comment, “to hear from the Japanese that staying in the
United States may hinder their keeping up with changing technology when there was a time
when they came to the United States to acquire such knowledge. Times lave changed.” [p95]
Conclusions
1. The cases above clearly show that there are few similarities and huge differences
among foreign engineers in their reasons to come to the US, their experiences while
in the US, and their contributions to their countries and the US. Their reasons to come
were shaped by circumstances at home, desire for social status, and US foreign
policy. Experiences in the US were conditioned by who they are, what they know,
what they want, and how they are perceived and treated in the US.
2. The history of engineering begins to look very different when actors that have remain
invisible from traditional accounts become visible. New and often unknown links
between key events in US history, such as the American Revolution and the Cold
War, and events in other countries emerge. New areas for research for scholars of
engineering and technology studies emerge. For example, emerging accounts of
foreign engineers working alongside US engineers in corporations (e.g., Hungarians
at Ford, Timoshenko at Westinghouse) or in key innovation regions (e.g., Chinese in
Silicon Valley) raise questions about knowledge transfer between engineers of
different national origins.
3. In international engineering education programs, differences among foreign engineers
should make us question our assumptions about how foreign students and engineers
want to engage US peers, relate to US engineering knowledge including curriculum
choice, are best served by career services, and get involved in extra-curricular
activities. Might it be the case that some groups of foreign students are uninterested in
engaging their US classmates not because of language differences but due to specific
desires about what they want to get when in the US? Could these cases begin to
illuminate why foreign engineering students do not choose humanities and social
science courses as often as US students do? Should career services engage the help of
professional networks such as those described above to better serve our foreign
engineering students?
4. For those of us involved in global competency of engineers, these cases challenge us
to refine our definition and criteria of global competency. Maybe outbound US
student should gain a deeper understanding of their own circumstances for going
abroad. As we have seen, the decision to go abroad and the experiences while abroad
are shaped by complex circumstances at home and abroad yet most students see it as
autonomous and individual. Perhaps, outbound students should be learning about
what is going on in the US (e.g., emergence of economic competitiveness),
engineering education (e.g., ABET), and elsewhere (e.g., if going to Europe, students
should learn about Bologna Declaration). Students should also understand what status
seeking is all about to better deal with parents and peers influence on going abroad.
5. For those of us involved in serving foreign students in the US, then, as the cases
above suggest, we need to better understand and analyze circumstances in foreign
students’ home countries, status and class dimensions that prompt foreign students to
travel to the US, what foreign students have come to value as engineering knowledge
and how all these might shape their desires.