If, like me, you believe that the U.S. needs to welcome immigrants on a sustainable basis, you should support a greater U.S. government priority on the immigration of skilled Indian citizens to the United States.
There are a great number of Indian graduates in technology-related fields who would promote U.S. prosperity for the future: economic domination of the technology sector. It’s a concern we must not take for granted.
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While the H-1B visa exists to promote just the kind of high-skilled immigration that Indian technology graduates offer, neither the Trump administration nor Democrats have shown much interest in advancing that effort.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not to say that other areas of immigration policy are irrelevant. The conditions at illegal immigrant detention centers demand government action at home and abroad. The Trump administration should always aim to promote immigration that offers most obvious utility to American prosperity. That means hard choices about who gets to come here and who doesn’t.
That includes actions such as the Trump administration act on Monday to restrict immigration by asylum-seekers who have previously transited Mexico without claiming asylum there.
The U.S. should also be cautious in which high-skill graduates it prefers. Chinese technology graduates desiring U.S. residency, for example, should be judged with far greater scrutiny than their Indian counterparts. Many Chinese graduates are Ministry of State Security or military spies, or will be pressured into becoming spies at a future point. U.S. firms such as Google also deserve far greater scrutiny over their overt submission to China.
But India is an increasingly important strategic partner bound to America by shared values and ambitions.
The basic point is this: We must develop the next iPhone, or Amazon, or Facebook, and thus that which will create vast export potential for the U.S. economy. We must ask what other technologies, medical, military, or otherwise, immigrants might one day create. Albert Einstein’s experience in America tells us the potential is near-limitless.
For the sake of our future, we cannot sit idle in getting Indian technology graduates to our shores.
