Keeping America competitive: why the U.S. needs to attract and keep the world's first-round intellectual draft choices.

• Author: Friedman, Thomas L.
• Position: OPINION

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First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry. I recently took part in commencement at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.--one of America's great science and engineering schools. One by one, the announcer read the names of the Ph.D. students as each was handed his or her doctorate--in biotechnology, computing, physics, and engineering--by the school's president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.'s was foreign-born. As the foreign names kept coming--"Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang"--I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until. "Paul Shane Morrow" saved the day.

It was such a caricature of what Jackson herself calls "the quiet crisis" in high-end science education in the U.S. that you could only laugh.

My complaint--and why I also wanted to cry--was that there wasn't someone from Citizenship and Immigration Services standing there stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.'s. I want them all to stay, become Americans, and do their research and innovation here.

If we can't educate enough of our own kids to compete at this Level, we'd better make sure we can import someone else's--otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.

It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders--as wide as...