Are you highly educated and foreign-born? Then get lost

September 10, 2008

How America is slamming the door on the world’s best and brightest

Buried beneath screaming headlines denouncing “illegal” blue collar workers from Mexico, news reports touting the virtues of building a southern border fence, and editorials trumpeting harsh work-site raids to round-up and deport “illegal” workers, there is a little-noticed alarm that is warning of the ongoing American loss in the war for global white collar talent.

News outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the BBC, and The Economist have been warning that America’s misguided H-1B visa quota is not “protecting American jobs” but rather is a policy of self-sabotage that in effect tells intelligent, highly educated, foreign-born white collar job seekers in the USA to scram.

What is an H-1B visa?

The H-1B visa is a work visa for college-educated foreign-born workers. If a job requires at least a bachelor’s degree, and the foreign-born applicant has the required degree, the U.S. employer may request an H-1B visa from the federal government to authorize the applicant to work in the USA. The H-1B has been widely used by international workers with bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D degrees in science, management, law, engineering, mathematics, public policy and high-technology. The foreign-born workers in this category are truly the world’s best and brightest.

So, What is the Problem?

It is insane (and I don’t use that term lightly) to adopt a national H-1B policy that deliberately excludes from our workforce the best and the brightest from all over the world. The immigration control system for white-collar workers in the U.S. is clearly broken.

Currently, for each federal government fiscal year (which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 of the following year) there are only 65,000 H-1Bs for foreign-born workers with a four-year college degree, and an extra 20,000 for foreign-born workers with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. college or university. That’s it! – 85,000, for the entire USA each year. This limit is crippling U.S. employers and causing top-notch international workers with top-notch credentials to flee to countries with more sensible immigration policies - countries like Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Here is the ultimate insult: Every April 1, when the H-1B visas become available for the upcoming fiscal year, all 85,000 are taken almost instantly by the hundreds of thousands of applicants seeking jobs already offered to them in the USA. And here is the most cruel April Fools joke of all – the federal government deals with the shortage of visas (as compared to the enormous demand) by allocating the H-1Bs by lottery.

The lack of congressional will to reform this mess results in the following lamentable truth: Employers who have offered jobs to international workers may or may not be able to hire them, depending upon the results of the lottery. Workforce planning becomes a crap-shoot. And the foreign-born worker, with a job offer in hand, is kept waiting until his or her future employment in the USA is determined by a government-run wheel-of-chance. And, sadly, most international job seekers lose the lottery and are denied the opportunity to work in the USA. Their American job offers are withdrawn, and they ultimately flee to countries that welcome intelligent white collar workers with open arms.

If this H-1B policy isn’t insane, then what is? Why on earth would we – the United States of America; the land of economic freedom and opportunity; the shining city on a hill; the beacon of hope that has symbolically welcomed immigrants with its Statue of Liberty – send a message to the best and the brightest workers in the world that they are no longer welcome here? We are shooting ourselves in the foot at the same time we are trying to win the hundred-yard dash in the global economy. The last thing we need is a self-inflicted injury.

Long-term impact

Won’t this H-1B policy create bigger long-term economic problems? Absolutely. America’s self-created, long-term problems will astonish you if you haven’t already envisioned them, or personally experienced the economic pain caused by them. As reported in the mainstream media, the long-term problems caused by our broken immigration policy will surface in many ways, as illustrated by the following 10 typical (and horrifying) statistics as set-forth in the March 14, 2008 on-line edition of Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com) and the April 12, 2008 edition of The Economist:

1. Almost 70 of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. The H-1B work visa is the first of many steps required on the path toward immigrant status in the USA.

2. About 25% of the information technology companies in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs.

3. An estimated 40% of American Ph.Ds in science and engineering go to immigrants.

4. Almost 40% of all patents filed in the USA are filed by foreigners.

5. The information technology sector – relying on foreign-born white-collar workers – has accounted for more than half of America’s overall productivity growth since 1995.

6. The on-line edition of Inside Higher Ed notes that a study in 2005 by the Institute of International Education found that there were 565,039 international students studying in the United States, contributing $13.3 billion to the economy (just in tuition and living expenses alone

7. The Economist examined U.S. hospitals, along with U.S. colleges, and uncovered similarly dramatic statistics. American universities and hospitals – populated in large part by foreign-born students, doctors, nurses, and medical technologists – have served as stable employers and centers-of-study in unstable times, thus saving innumerable U.S. cities from economic ruin.

8. Bill Gates has estimated, and a number of economists have agreed, that every foreigner given an H-1B visa creates five new jobs to be filled by Americans.

9. Currently, many white collar-starved technology companies are being forced to export jobs that would have remained in the USA and would have been filled by foreigners except for the H-1B quota.

10. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that by 2014, there will be more than 2 million job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is sinking fast.

Ironically, just as other countries in the global economy are relaxing the restrictions on international workers from overseas, America is doing precisely the opposite. As America restricts the world’s best and brightest workers from accessing employment in the U.S. workforce, America is causing itself to lose the war for talented white-collar workers from all over the world.

Art Seratelli is a partner at Vandeventer Black LLP in Norfolk and chair of the firm’s Immigration Law Group.

Written by Arthur Serratelli  |  Filed Under Immigration 

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