Ensign sees need to change U.S. immigration law

WASHINGTON -- After visiting India last week, Sen. John Ensign on Wednesday said U.S. immigration law should be changed to encourage foreign students to remain in America instead of forcing them to return to their native countries.

"It's crazy that we subsidize the education of all these smart people, give them advanced degrees and then require them to go home," Ensign said in a phone interview from Lake Tahoe where he will attend the Tahoe Summit on Friday.

Although widespread poverty persists in India, the country already has developed a talented work force and wages there are going up substantially, Ensign said.

College graduates with engineering degrees earn only one-fourth in India of what they could make in the United States, but after five years there is not much of a disparity, Ensign said.

Ensign, a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, toured the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, considered the Silicon Valley of India.

Though professors at the institute said the United States is still considered the world leader in higher education, American schools from kindergarten through high school are not as highly regarded, Ensign said.

"We have to focus on making sure we continue to be the innovators of the world, and that means funding research in the physical sciences," the Republican senator said.

After spending three days in Bangalore, Ensign joined his 15-year-old son, Trevor, and friends near Chennai in southern India to visit an orphanage the senator has helped support for the last seven years.

"It was one of the most powerful experiences I've had in my life," Ensign said.

Despite the technology boom sweeping India, millions of people there live on $2 a day or less.

Ensign also described India as a "very dirty country with open sewers."

"I never got used to the smells. They were everywhere we went," he said.

The orphanage includes four schools and about 1,500 children who sleep on straw mats and fill buckets where there is running water so they can bathe and brush their teeth, Ensign said.

Nevertheless, the orphans had a genuine joy about them, Ensign said.

"We have so much in America, and trips like this make you appreciate that," Ensign said. "Just reading about it doesn't cut it."