The Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (CIR ASAP), introduced by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) is a smorgasbord of immigration reform proposals. For highly skilled immigrants, CIR ASAP removes the cap on employment-based green cards for foreign graduates with a master’s or higher degree from an American university. That’s all well and good, but it also saddles employers with new regulations and burdens on H-1B visas for highly skilled temporary workers.
American technological achievement is the bedrock of our economic prosperity.
From medicine to the Internet, immigrants are vital to inventing new gadgets and building the companies that deliver them to our doorsteps. But our government’s H-1B visa policy severely restricts the entry of highly skilled foreign workers, who are many of the inventors, to a paltry 85,000 annually. CIR ASAP helps alleviate that by providing an alternative way for graduates to stay.
But H-1B visas restrictions should be curtailed. The driver of economic growth in the modern world is knowledge. Scientific discoveries spill over into related fields to fuel further discoveries. Scientists working in research teams share insights with each other that allow greater output. Scientists and engineers working closely together increase the speed and scope of their research. When this brain power is geographically concentrated, it boosts economic growth and technological development.
Foreign skilled workers are more than twice as likely as American skilled workers to patent
. That is because immigrants who come here with skills are usually the best and brightest of their home countries. They come to America for the freedom and economic opportunity available to a hardworking person—especially someone with valuable skills.
Foreign graduate students also contribute to America’s ongoing technological success. A 2005 World Bank study found that foreign graduate students in the U.S. file an enormous number of patents. Additionally, a quarter of international patents filed from the U.S. in 2006 named a non-U.S. citizen working in the U.S. as the inventor or co-inventor.
But the scientific discoveries that lead to technological breakthroughs aren’t merely of a practical nature. Of the eight American citizens who received Nobel Prizes in the science categories in 2009, five are immigrants to the United States. Unfortunately, the contribution of highly educated and skilled immigrants to American technology, science, and economic growth is very often ignored in the immigration debate.
Their contribution cannot be overestimated. One quarter of American Nobel Prize winners since 1901 have been immigrants. Today, a third of all the scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley are immigrants or foreign-born. Furthermore, 40 percent of the Ph.D. scientists working in the U.S. are foreign-born. To claim that the United States would be better off with fewer of these highly skilled foreign workers runs counter to reality.
America’s current immigration laws artificially limit our capacity and speed of technological advancement.
The engineers and Ph.D.s driving much of the technological innovation in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly Indian. A growing number of them are here illegally. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, there maybe almost 300,000 illegal Indian immigrants in the U.S.
Many of the Indians residing here illegally arrived here on H-1B or student visas and overstayed their legal residency in the hope of getting a green card. CIR ASAP would make it so many of them could stay, work, and legally contribute to our society.
A quarter of all venture backed U.S. public firms started between 1990 and 2005 had at least one immigrant founder. The largest firms who had at least one immigrant co-founder are Intel, Sanmina-SCI, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo!, and Google. They have a combined market capitalization of approximately $242.5 billion. H-1B workers and those on employment-based green cards are entrepreneurial, inventive, and motivated.
Highly skilled foreigners contribute to economic growth. There should be not be such a strict numerical cap or other onerous restrictions on highly skilled immigrants that grow America’s prosperity.
The CIR ASAP’s increase of green cards for the highly educated is a step in the right direction, but new regulations on H-1Bs would prove economically harmful. The U.S. policy of keeping out millions of inventive, brilliant, and entrepreneurial people stunts technological development and business growth.
Alex Nowrasteh is an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
