My view is this:
If Minnesota opens its doors to the entire world to practice here, there will be a lot of takers. Listen to how many of you are talking about it already. Why Minnesota? Simply because it is the only state that will let you. It would only take a relatively small number of dentists to tip the balance in this or any other state into a serious economic downturn for established practitioners and US dental graduates. With all of them flooding into one, small to mid-sized state, you will see a huge chunk being taken out of American incomes. Minnesota already has its own dental school and no shortage of dentists. The state has good oral health care statistics that are some of the nation's best.
A little bit about another problem that mirrors this. I am a recent graduate of a top-5 program in Management Information Systems, which deals with the management of information technology resources and how they impact businesses. Four years ago, this was the most marketable major with the highest placement rate and starting salaries of any possible degree at this school. Companies fought over graduates with bidding wars and signing bonuses. There were 3-4 offers for each graduate. The same was seen in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and other technical disciplines.
Fast forward four years, to the present. I graduated in four years with a degree in MIS, with a 3.5 GPA and a 3.95 in my major. This placed me at the top of my class. Based on this, I should be the most marketable person at the entire university, right? Wrong. I received no offers and only one interview in five months. They ended up eliminating the one position I did interview for in a cost cutting move. Most of my classmates found nothing either. They are scrambling and competing madly for internships after graduation, and most are like me, sitting at home playing video games all day with little hope for a job. I have a highly regarded degree, a high GPA, difficult to learn skills, many leadership experiences, strong communications skills, health, decent looks, and a gosh darn IQ of 150 to boot. I want to work desperately but can contribute nothing to any organization. I have no health insurance, no money coming in, and student loans out the rear end. If nothing turns up in a few months, I am very seriously looking at homelessness.
The unemployment rate for tech people in America has skyrocketed to almost triple the highest recorded amount in HISTORY. Most will never work in their field again. New graduates face the hopeless struggle to find work with little or no non-academic experience in a climate that is not hiring and is laying people off as fast as possible. While this is happening, foreign workers are coming over in record and unprecedented numbers on H-1B and L-1 visas. Companies claim a labor shortage to the government so that they can bring in foreigners at lower wages and who cannot leave the company under penalty of deportation. They are virtual indentured servants. Even worse, many companies are sending programming and other white collar work over to India to be performed offshore. Due to cost of living discrepancies, they can save a tremendous amount of money. Over three million jobs have already been lost to visas and offshoring, and it has been estimated that another 4-5 million white collar jobs will be lost by the end of the decade. This doesn't even count the millions of manufacturing jobs that have been sent out. Politicians won't do anything to stop it because companies lobby for increased numbers of foreigners so that they can phase out all American citizens.
For example, I was talking to my friend's mother the other day who works at a major local employer, 3M, in accounting. She fears for her job every day because it is clear what the company's plan is. She says that they have not brought in a US citizen to work in her department in the past 3 years. Many get laid off and are replaced almost immediately with Indians and Chinese on H-1B visas. One of the company's foremost priorities is offshoring, and they have ceased all hiring at my school. They used to hire over 50 new grads per year here.
You can see why this upsets me.