A recent report from Duke University that critiques the supposed gap between the number of American science and engineering (S&E) graduates and those of merging economies -- especially China's -- has led to false reassurance that the U.S. lead in science and technology is not under threat from China. It would be a grave mistake to drop our concerns about China's competitive challenge.

First, the Duke report simply claimed that China's true number of science and engineering bachelor degrees was 351,000, rather than the widely reported 600,000. Coupling this with an upward adjustment for American graduates still left China producing 214,000 more such degrees than the United States.

Moreover, undergraduates are only part of the concern. China's production of those with doctorates has increased rapidly. By 2003, China's homegrown science and engineering doctorates numbered almost half of the U.S. total.

Chinese were also earning large numbers of doctorates abroad. In 2001, the number of Chinese S&E doctorates earned in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States equaled 72 percent of the total of S&E doctorates earned by American citizens and permanent residents.

Since 1975, China has increased its global share of S&E doctorates from zero (courtesy of the Cultural Revolution) to 11 percent, not counting doctorates earned overseas. During the same three decades, the U.S. global share has fallen from half to roughly 22 percent.

More worrisome than the aggregate numbers is American universities' reliance on foreigners who earn doctorates. In engineering, foreigners account for over half of America's doctorates, and in computer science just under half.

If foreign-born holders of doctorates continued to stay in the United States, we wouldn't have to worry. Unfortunately, there are many signs that it is becoming much harder to retain them.

One need only look at the flow from Taiwan, one of the former main sources of American S&E doctoral degrees, to see what could happen. Up until 1994, Taiwanese earned more science and engineering doctorates in the United States than members of any other foreign nationality. By 2000, their numbers had plummeted because economic and educational opportunities at home were more appealing.

The Taiwanese didn't just stop coming to America. They also began to leave. As Taiwan's tech sector boomed in the 1990s, huge numbers of Taiwanese technologists (estimates range as high as 100,000) left America for home and took their technical skills with them.

Our two current biggest foreign sources of technologists, China and India, appear to be following Taiwan's path. China has begun to lure back large numbers of technologists. China's central and local governments offer free office space and other benefits to attract technologists home. These inducements are working. A 2005 survey of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professionals Association's members showed that the vast majority regard China as the most likely future work destination, and they rated Shanghai higher than even Silicon Valley on career potential. India's recruitment efforts have also started to bear fruit.

The challenge is not simply keeping up the numbers of technologists in America. China by many measures has improved its technological capabilities. On the Georgia Institute of Technology's Index of Technological Capability, China has more than doubled its index score over the past decade. China now ranks fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany.

This rapid ascent is not surprising given China's increasing investments. China's research and development spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has tripled to 1.3 percent in the last decade, even while its GDP has ballooned. Few emerging economies spend even 1 percent of their GDP on research.

U.S. patents invented in China are also on the rise. Information-technology patents from corporations' Chinese technologists have risen from 134 in 1997-2001 to 482 during 2002-04. As a first step to meet this challenge, we should increase federal spending on basic and exploratory research. Our R&D spending has been flat at 2.6 percent of GDP for four decades, but the share of federal spending has declined from two-thirds to one-quarter.

Given that corporations now de-emphasize basic scientific research, the federal government should further support the basic research that could maintain our lead at the cutting edge of technology.

Increased federal funding would also address the issue of the falling share of investment in certain disciplines. With spending flat, the rising share commanded by biomedicine has meant a falling share spent on engineering and physics.

Federal support may also play a direct role in increasing interest in pursuing a science education. Since the 1950s, the number of undergraduate S&E majors in America has risen and fallen in line with federal research funding, as Professor Henry Rowen of Stanford University has pointed out.

Before meeting China's challenge, we first must recognize it. Complacency in reaction to "good'' news that China is producing fewer S&E graduates than commonly thought is not the answer.

The fierce debate on immigration ignores a crucial reality -- what is happening to the United States is only one piece, although a big one, of a much larger global picture.

That hit me a couple of weeks ago when I was in Singapore. The Southeast Asian island nation has long been hailed as an economic model, the business capital for the entire region.

But it is an economy facing demographic peril. Its small population of 4 million is shrinking, thanks to a very low fertility rate. Prosperous Singaporean couples work hard, have fewer children and worry about how to take care of their aging parents. By 2050, Singapore will have a median age of over 52, one of the oldest in the world.

Singapore's answer is to import labor. A third of its workforce are migrants, from construction workers to maids. One out of seven households employs a domestic worker -- low-paid women mostly from neighboring Philippines and Indonesia.

Singapore tries to lure "talents'' -- highly skilled and affluent migrants -- to stay permanently. But the men hauling bricks and the maids washing laundry are in a separate class of temporary guest workers, with no chance to join Singaporean society. If a maid becomes pregnant, she is shipped out within seven days. Employers have to post bonds that must be paid should their servants break the rules and try to stay, putting them in the role of migrant police.

Problems of abuse of domestic workers, including physical and sexual violence and confinement, are serious enough to have prompted a report last December by Human Rights Watch.

Singapore's dependence on migrant labor and its guest-worker policy may be at the extreme end but it's very much on the global spectrum. Labor, like capital and goods before it, is part of a global market. The movement of people across borders in search of wages and work, most of it from developing countries to developed, is growing at a phenomenal pace.

The numbers are staggering. From 1980 to 2000, the number of migrants living in the developed world more than doubled from 48 million to 110 million. Migrants make up an average 12 percent of the workforce in high-income countries. About 4 million migrants cross borders illegally every year.

The demand for labor is driven in part by a demographic disaster -- the falling birth rates of developed countries. Almost all of those countries now have fertility rates that are well below 2.1, the level at which a population replaces itself. At the very low end are Hong Kong (0.94), Korea (1.22) and Singapore in Asia (1.24), along with much of Eastern Europe.

Low fertility means shrinking workforces and aging populations. Without migration, according to a recent study, Europe's population would have declined by 4.4 million from 1995 to 2000. Immigration accounted for 75 percent of U.S. population growth during the same period.

This movement of people cannot be stopped, certainly not by hundreds of miles of fences or even by tens of thousands of border guards. It is an issue that cries out for global cooperation, for common policies that cut across national boundaries. Already, we can benefit from looking at what has worked -- and not worked -- elsewhere.

A Global Commission on International Migration, formed in 2003 by the United Nations secretary-general, has taken an initial stab. Their report, issued last winter, supports the growth of guest-worker programs.

The Senate immigration bill now up for debate includes a provision for a guest-worker program. The bill is clearly preferable to the punitive and ineffective approach of the House version. But the Singapore experience -- and previous guest-worker programs like the German import of Turks -- should prompt second thoughts about going down this road.

One problem is that the guests don't leave. The United States has its own experience with this in the bracero program to import farmworkers, and more recently with the supposedly temporary H1-B visas used so extensively by the high-tech industry here in Silicon Valley.

Most troubling to me, these programs create an underclass of migrants who are never assimilated, as happened in Germany. It sets us on the Singapore road, encouraging inhumane policing mechanisms. And it is a gilded invitation to employers to depress the wages and incomes of American workers, and not just in the dirty jobs that are supposedly so hard to fill.

The United States has been rightfully proud of a tradition that treats all immigrants as citizens in the making. Rather than guest workers, isn't it more American to set realistic immigration quotas and enforce them fairly?

The nuclear deal reached during President Bush's recent visit to India unleashed a predictable wave of criticism. From editorial and op-ed pages to Congress, led by the left but supported on the right, the administration has been assailed for making a bad bargain.

Under the agreement, which still needs congressional approval, India would open much of its nuclear facilities to international inspections in return for gaining access to the world's supplies of uranium and U.S. nuclear expertise.

The attacks on the deal reflect the view of the nonproliferation lobby -- the experts and policymakers whose central concern is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. I share their aim. But American arguments against the India deal are misleading and only expose the deep contradictions, if not hypocrisy, of our own nuclear policies.

There are two main criticisms of the agreement: first, it undermines the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT, and second, it permits, even encourages, India to expand its nuclear weapons production.

The NPT issue is particularly sensitive at a time when the international community is trying to persuade Iran to give up certain nuclear technologies which many nations fear are part of a secret bomb program.

The NPT created two sets of global rules -- one for the five nuclear weapons powers it recognizes (China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France) and another for everyone else. The five, for example, allow only "voluntary'' international safeguards on their civilian nuclear facilities. They have no obligation to open their military programs to any kind of scrutiny. And the NPT places no real limits on their arsenals, other than a vague commitment to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The rest must open their nuclear energy programs fully to international inspection and agree never to build bombs. In exchange, they gain access to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Iran -- and North Korea -- made that bargain and can be held to account for breaking the rules. But India consistently regarded that as an unequal trade-off and never signed the NPT; neither did Pakistan and Israel, two other nuclear weapons states.

India's nuclear program is the product of decades of largely indigenous effort; it did not result from secretive proliferation in violation of the NPT.

The deal with India turns the five into six. It treats India as a de facto member of the inner club. The deal would require changes in U.S. law to remove existing restrictions on the transfer of nuclear energy technology, changes that would allow India to be treated no differently from China.

That does not weaken the NPT -- it strengthens it. It brings it more into accord with reality and gives India a stake in a system it had previously rejected as unfair. It paves the way for India to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the international organization that controls nuclear exports.

The critics are right that the deal enables India to expand its production of fissile materials to make nuclear warheads. Eight of India's 22 power reactors will remain outside international controls, along with a new breeder reactor. The Indians fought for that exemption because they feel their nuclear arsenal may not be large enough to deter a nuclear first strike by Pakistan or China in the future. Critics fear that with increased access to uranium and limited inspections, India will set off an arms race in South Asia.

Again, the agreement simply treats India like the five. Nonproliferation experts claim that unlike India, however, the five have halted their production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that could be used to build new weapons. This is true, but misleading.

The five have massive stockpiles of fissile material built up during the Cold War. "If I've got a full pantry, it's easy for me to swear off trips to the supermarket,'' said Michael Levi, an arms-control expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Moreover, the United States has embarked on a new program to rebuild its nuclear weapons production capability, including creating new facilities to produce plutonium cores for warheads and to assemble them.

India has agreed to back a global pact to cut off fissile-material production. But the Bush administration does not support a treaty that would actually verify this is taking place. And the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that would permanently halt any new testing of nuclear weapons.

A Congress that can support those policies is hardly in a position to challenge the administration's agreement with India. Rather than block the U.S.-India deal, it makes more sense to improve it. This could include reaching agreements for cooperation between the two countries to ensure the safety and security of nuclear facilities, including those for military purposes, suggested Stanford Professor Scott D. Sagan, a leading expert on nuclear safety and nonproliferation. "Reducing the risk of terrorist theft of nuclear materials or weapons in India would also help protect the United States,'' argues Sagan.

Beyond that, the six acknowledged nuclear powers should begin to seriously fulfill their part of the NPT bargain -- to cap fissile-material production, to ban nuclear testing, and to eventually radically reduce stored arsenals of nuclear weapons and materials.