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Removing H-1B visa quotas will create American job...
How do you feel about this?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/04/09/removing-h-1b-quotas-will-create-american-jobs/
The U.S. government began accepting applications for H-1B high-skilled work visas this week. As the requests pour in, U.S. business leaders are already telling Congress that the program is woefully inadequate to meet their demand for skilled workers. Cristobal Conde, immigrant entrepreneur and former CEO of Sungard Data, is one of those leaders. ?If I were to try to come to America today, the likelihood is I would be turned away,? he said this week. ?I hope Congress will come to its senses and roll out the red carpet.?
Congress has created a system that is unresponsive to market demand for these workers. H-1B visas and employer-sponsored green cards are the primary means by which U.S. companies compete for foreign skilled labor. Like the rest of the economy, this process is too regulated and restricted.
To start with, these programs require high-skilled laborers to be sponsored by an employer before they can come into the country to work. Worse, H-1B visas expire after just three years and are only renewable once. This comes as a huge tax to potential employers who must then begin the job search all over again. Speaking of taxes, the Obama administration raised the H-1B fee by more than 600 percent, from $320 to $2,000, only adding to the costly program.
Worst of all is the arbitrary cap. Only 85,000 H-1B visas are awarded each year to private companies. Before the recession and the fee hike, in most years all the available visas would be gone in a matter of days. The additional fees, regulations and lousy economy slowed down that process; last year, employers tapped out the program after several months. This year, the cap will prove even more inadequate, as the economy recovers. Such bureaucratic restrictions stifle growth. In particular, the technology sector, which depends on foreign-talent for expansion and has a very low unemployment rate, will see its growth constrained by the arbitrary limit.
Foreign highly skilled workers do not ?take? American jobs. The economy doesn?t have a set number of jobs. Rather, jobs are created and destroyed based on production possibilities and economic innovation. Firms hire H-1B workers as they expand, so the cap on H-1Bs severely limits companies? ability to expand and hire more workers. As American companies begin to recover from the recent economic downturn, the government should make expansion and innovation easier, not harder.
Limits on H-1Bs mean long term limits on job creation. Like Cristobal Conde, immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial, which means they are job creators, not takers. More than 40 percent of America?s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, according to the Partnership for a New American Economy. In Silicon Valley, about one-third of all companies were founded or co-founded by Indian or Chinese nationals who were once able to work legally in the U.S. under H-1B visas or green cards.
Foreign skilled workers also do not lower wages. Highly skilled foreign workers generally complement, rather than compete with, American workers. What H-1B restrictions actually do is force American firms to expand abroad in order to hire the workers they need. For example, Microsoft recently opened a campus in Canada because the U.S. government would not allow it to hire enough highly skilled foreigners.
Firms would rather innovate in the U.S. because of our laws, capitalist institutions, and large investments in research and development. But if firms cannot import the talent they demand, they will go elsewhere to get their work done. Research and expansion suffer as a whole and all of us are made worse off.
It?s time Congress took Conde?s advice and ?rolled out the red carpet.? H-1B quota and time limits should be removed, and the fee should be cut to cover administrative costs only. The requirement of company sponsorship should be either loosened or replaced with employee self-sponsorship. Unlike many other programs on Congress?s agenda, rolling out the proverbial red carpet will cost the government nothing -- and will create the jobs and innovations that will make tomorrow?s economy prosper.
Re: Removing H-1B visa quotas will create American job...
I work in tech as well at a large financial institution and our CTO was just talking about the lack of onshore resources with the right skills. I don't think any major company will even blink at the cost of the visa itself (I know this doesn't hold for small companies).
And yes, of course, we should invest in developing our schools to fix the deficiencies. We also need to guide children (and redirect adults) to these jobs. Tell them this is where the jobs and the money are and show them the path to the skills necessary to compete for the jobs.
What type of degree would you recommend for getting into this field? Computer Science?
It totally depends on what "field" you're talking about. But Computer Science and Computer Engineering would be two big ones. H and I both have Computer Science degrees. H works with a number of off-shore and H-1B visa holders at a major financial institution as well.
I think we've talked extensively on this board about the skills/education mismatch in the workforce compared to the jobs that are hiring. It absolutely needs to be addressed. These jobs are the way of the future.
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One of my hot button issues is the fact that we allow people to come to the US to get an education and then we make them leave. What a shamefully short-sighted practice. Along the same lines as encouraging (or even requiring) these individuals to keep their talents in the US, I fully support the expansion of the visa program.
This:
"Foreign highly skilled workers do not ?take? American jobs. The economy doesn?t have a set number of jobs. Rather, jobs are created and destroyed based on production possibilities and economic innovation. Firms hire H-1B workers as they expand, so the cap on H-1Bs severely limits companies? ability to expand and hire more workers. As American companies begin to recover from the recent economic downturn, the government should make expansion and innovation easier, not harder."
...is a point that is significant and seems lost on so many, including many who should be smart enough to know better but choose to let their xenophobia or outsized patriotism cloud their judgment.
I will just ditto IIOY. I don't work in technology or engineering but we do bring in a fair amount of H1Bs.
Honestly we should be clamoring for more H1Bs because so frequently the alternative is to simply offshore the job or even the office. Our H1B employees are pretty well compensated. They pay taxes, and they spend that income on our economy. If we offshore the jobs, they still don't go to Americans, the salaries are untaxed and our businesses don't benefit from that spending. Not to mention the lost innovation and investment when we keep highly skilled people away from our citizens out of fear.
When it comes to protectionism and immigration I really have no political home.
If someone's working out, can't the employer just sponsor them for a green card and avoid having to search again? Our green card applications went in a couple of weeks after the H1B came through. If they automatically applied for a green card after a year on an H1B the transition could be seamless when the second H1B expires.
You could even slant towards the Technology/Business degree (each college calls it something different but it's tech-y part of the business school vs. the computer science/engineering school). We need people who are interested in engineering, science on a hands-on development type of mind but also don't forget the value of the critical thinker, logical, architect type who can "speak" the tech language but can also be put in front of a client and present themselves well. So show students that there ARE jobs out there that are not so hands-on techy (so not to scare them away) but can be very very useful in the tech world (requirements gathering, testing, QA/documentation, project management, etc). There's cool things going on in data analytics and data mining too!!
Then there's the whole other side of cyber security and data privacy...If I were to rewind 20 years I would have gone into that field. It fascinates me!
Yes, ditto everything Terps said. I'm sorry, I forgot to keep an eye on this post. I work on the admin side so my degree in Political Science doesn't get me too far but I've been able to leverage my analytical skills to do all the not so techy stuff Terps detailed.
Sadly, I have a feeling the bolded is going to end up happening to me. I'm Canadian but in the States getting my Masters. Many of the companies I've spoken to don't want to take on the hassle of dealing with a foreign worker. It's very likely that I'll end up back in Canada, which I really don't want.
I'm not Fox News, but in MY mind it's all about supply and demand. The types of jobs that the highly skilled visa workers are filling could not be "replaced" by American workers..our homegrown work force just can't keep up with that type of demand. But the type of jobs that the unskilled illegal immigrants are taking COULD be done by available American workers. Bad example but it's a J2EE developer vs a lettuce picker. Unemployed Joe Smith can't automatically be a J2EE developer..but he could be a lettuce picker (if the salary and location was a match --that's a whole other issue). That's my understanding of the argument...
ETA and regarding the highly skilled won't lower the wage issue...I don't believe that the H1-B visa people get paid a lower salary/wage based on their citizenship (or non) status. They are still living here in the States, paying taxes, renting/buying homes, shopping for household goods. So they need to make a competitive wage just to live here. When we are off shoring/outsourcing the jobs overseas that is where we are seeing the cost savings of certain positions/job types. Not when we keep them "in house" here.