Investor's Business Daily, April 5th, 2007
H-1B Visas: The U.S. is again showing how well it can seal the border against skilled, law-abiding workers who are crucial to its economic future.
"It's just nuts," says Carl Shusterman, an immigration attorney quoted in the Los Angeles Times. And we couldn't agree more. Shusterman was describing the federal government's super-tight restrictions on visas doled out each year to highly skilled foreign workers needed by technology firms.
This year, as in the past, 65,000 of these H-1B visas are available. Last Monday, the first day on which applications were accepted for 2007, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received more than 150,000 petitions from companies needing them to hire scientists, engineers, architects, computer programmers and other highly trained employees. It's clear that a lot of skilled workers wishing to live and work here are out of luck.
Employers have a problem, too, though they can close some of the brainpower gap by shifting work offshore to low-wage havens such as India. The big loser in the long run is the U.S. as a whole. We stand to lose tens of thousands of talented, productive people, many educated at its universities, to other nations with more rational immigration policies.
It's also worth noting that the workers waiting for H-1B visas, as well as the employers submitting applications for them, are working within the system. That sets them apart from millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants and their employers, who evade the law and usually don't get caught.
Just think of the message this sends to the world: Break our rules and thrive; follow our rules and find the door slammed in your face.
The current H-1B limit of 65,000 is an arbitrary number that needs to be revised upward to fit current demands. It may once have made some political (if not economic) sense when tech was slumping and U.S.-born workers were scrambling for scarce jobs, but no more.
Two House members, Democrat Louis Gutierrez of Illinois and Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona, have offered a bill that would raise the cap to 115,000, with possible further hikes to 180,000. It would provide further slots for people who have earned advanced degrees in the U.S.
Whatever else it does on the immigration front this year, Congress should at least stir itself to pass this bill or something similar. And we have a hunch that most lawmakers see the need for more H-1B visas.
The real threat to H-1B reform may be the pressure for a "comprehensive" immigration bill that deals with all the hard issues in one package. But the need for skilled workers is too urgent to justify putting a good H-1B bill on hold until Congress can hash out agreements on amnesty, guest workers, or citizenship tracks.
There's just no excuse for keeping the door closed to so many of the world's best and brightest.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
