Last month, the annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas was again exhausted in just five days, with over 190,000 petitions filed by tens of thousands of U.S. employers. However, missing from the discussion around the annual H-1B lottery and cap is something far more important to our country’s future than a single nonimmigrant visa program. To put it simply, highly skilled immigration to America is a much bigger system and a much bigger problem than the H-1B cap.
Right now, permanently employed foreign professionals working legally in key innovative roles in America are backlogged decades in our outdated immigration system. As a result, the comparatively minor H-1B visa program has become a major systemic chokepoint, servicing not only temporary workers — its original mandate — but also filling key employment authorization gaps in our nation’s most merit-driven permanent immigration program, employment-based green cards.
This bigger picture is key to understanding the real need for highly skilled immigration reform.
First, our U.S.-born STEM workforce stands out as the best in the world, powered by the best STEM university programs and departments on the planet. In spite of accounting for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we dominate the world’s fastest-growing, leading-edge technology markets. We are the envy of other nations in this regard.
However we cannot lose sight of a simple reality: We did not grow to this position of global STEM dominance with U.S.-born STEM workers alone. Foreign STEM professionals have always been an essential ingredient. From unlocking the power of the atom to rocket technology to the rise of the computer age and finally to the “Internet of things,” these quintessentially mid-to-late 20th century leaps in American technology were driven as much by talented foreign men and women who migrated to America as the Americans who recruited them to our country.
Second, it’s equally important to understand that America’s “highly skilled immigration system” is actually a cobbled together collection of immigration programs constructed in the last century. As a result, highly skilled immigration to America is riddled with inefficiency, uncertainty, and results that seem to undermine the spirit of the law even without breaking it — much to the frustration of many Americans and our American employer community as well.
Finally, as we look to reform and remake our “highly skilled immigration system,” we all must keep in mind another simple truth: There are no jobs without employers, and there is no production without workers. Any attempt to help one group without helping the others will only result in damage to all Americans.
Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., have redrafted and reintroduced a bill that will make essential changes to how we train, recruit, and retain the best STEM professionals in the world. “The Immigration Innovation Act” (I-Squared) enhances protections and opportunities for American-born professionals while providing certainty and overdue systemic improvements to U.S. employers and the foreign professionals STEM employers need.
I-Squared will create a highly skilled immigration system that produces $1 billion a year in U.S. workforce STEM retraining and education, paid for by U.S. employers who hire foreign professionals.
I-Squared eliminates discriminatory per country caps, ending the practice of allowing certain U.S.-based foreign workers to jump ahead of other equally qualified U.S.-based foreign workers because of their country of birth.
I-Squared modernizes highly skilled immigration to the U.S. by allowing for conditional green cards rather than H-1Bs when foreign professionals are being hired for permanent positions by their employers.
Finally, I-Squared establishes a market-based H-1B cap that increases and decreases H-1B visas based on economic indicators, requires all employers to pay higher wages tied to economic data for H-1B professionals, and puts even greater wage restrictions on employers that are defined as H-1B dependent.
U.S. STEM employers are committed to ensuring our highly skilled immigration system is helping America. We call on Congress now to take action in the same spirit and start the overdue process of reform.
Scott Corley is executive director of Compete America, a coalition dedicated to ensuring that the U.S. has the highly educated and innovative workforce necessary to grow the economy and create American jobs. Learn more about Compete America at competeamerica.org.
