Top ‘O the Mornin’ to Ya – The case for increasing high-skilled immigration

“What do Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie have in common? Both were immigrants. How about the companies Intel, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems? All have been incredibly successful and all were founded by immigrants.” (Larry Sumney, president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, May 18, 2007) Based on the fact that “Nationwide these immigrants founded companies that produced $452 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005,” (The National Foundation for American Policy, March 2008) and “For firms with fewer than 5,000 employees, each H-1B position requested in labor condition applications was associated with an increase of employment of 7.5 workers compared to 4.7 additional workers at firms employing between 5,000 and 10,000 workers,” (National Foundation For American Policy, March 2008) one would assume that our country is doing all it can to welcome brilliant foreign nationals into the United States and encourage them to stay and work for us. Sadly, this is not the case and instead immigrants are met with a yearly cap on visas that is used up the second day that the applications are released, and the yearly allotment of 65,000 visas is distributed via random lottery to the more than 100,000 applicants who applied on day one. After overcoming this first incredible obstacle, the vast majority of applicants are faced with 6-10 year backlogs after having their application accepted to the time they receive their visa.

While many people would like to think that the high-skilled visa cap of 65,000 is a carefully calculated number designed to reflect the free market, this is unfortunately not true. This cap is completely arbitrary, and this restriction on the avaliabiltiy of work visas for foreign graduates of American universities is creating brain drain, where foreign students come to the United States and are educated in our universities, only to be sent back to their home countries to create wealth for them instead of us.

Also, this cap on high-skilled visas, which sniffs of communistic restrictions placed on the flow of people by the Soviet Union, is a major factor in outsourcing of high-skilled jobs. According to the National Foundation for American Policy in March 2008, “Sixty-five percent of technology companies responding to an NFAP survey said in response to the lack of H-1B visas [Temporary work visas for high-skilled immigrants] they had "hired more people (or outsourced work) outside the United States.” This problem is most clearly demonstrated by a plant recently opened by Microsoft in Canada. Before opening this plant in Canada and moving hundreds of American jobs out of the country, Bill Gates petitioned congress to allow the workers to come here to the United States. However, his request was denied and Bill Gates moved the plant to Canada because of their less restrictive immigration laws. The people who state that bringing foreign workers to the United States is no better than outsourcing do not take into account that whenever foreign workers come to the United States, they spend money in our economy and many of them desire to ultimately settle here if they can obtain a permanent residence visa, thus allowing them to become Americans just like you and me.

So, considering the high-skilled labor shortage in America due to the lack of Americans graduating from masters or doctorate programs, an increase in the number of temporary and permanent residence visas for high skilled immigrants is definitely in order. “In electrical engineering, for example, 56% of master's and 66% of the PhD graduates of U.S. programs in 2004 were foreign students, according to Compete America.” Taking into account that many of these highly skilled foreign students will be unable to obtain a temporary work visa or a permanent resident visa, we should stop denying these highly skilled foreign students the right to stay in the United States and instead welcome to our country those who will be able to return our country to the former greatness in technology.