Illustration: David Klein
Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Michael Malone for the Wall Street Journal in which he notes that up to 1.5 million skilled workers are stuck in immigration limbo. Many give up and go home. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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The process of bringing skilled immigrants to the U.S. via H-1B visas and putting them on the path to eventual citizenship has been a political football for at least a decade. It has long been bad news for those immigrants trapped in this callous process. Now the U.S. economy is beginning to suffer, too.
Every year, tens of thousands of disappointed tech workers and other professionals give up while waiting for a resident visa or green card, and go home—having learned enough to start companies that compete with their former U.S. employers. The recent historic success of China’s Alibaba IPO is a reminder that a new breed of companies is being founded, and important innovation taking place, in other parts of the world. More than a quarter of all patents filed today in the U.S. bear the name of at least one foreign national residing here.
The U.S. no longer has a monopoly on great startups. In the past, the best and brightest people would come to the U.S., but now they are staying home. In Silicon Valley, according to a 2012 survey by Duke and Stanford Universities and the University of California at Berkeley, the percentage of new companies started by foreign-born entrepreneurs has begun to slide for the first time—down to 43.9% during 2006-12, from 52.4% during 1995-2005.
The brain drain from this dysfunctional skilled-immigrant policy has begun. Some of the most thoughtful alarms have been raised by Vivek Wadhwa, the author of The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent (Wharton, 2012).
Mr. Wadhwa, who teaches at Duke and Stanford, is particularly worried about the so-called STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Companies like Alibaba and Tencent are a warning signal that it is almost too late,” he tells me. “Either we get back to picking off the best and brightest STEM talent in the world, or someone else will.”
The first step in solving the skilled-immigrant crisis is to be honest about the real problem—and the motives of the players involved.
First, the difficulty is not about raising H-1B quota numbers. Surprised? That is all you hear about in the news: American business wants more H-1B immigrants. In fact, while H-1B visas have been stuck at about 65,000 a year (plus 20,000 students), that number can be changed with relatively simple moves by the president or Congress. A decade ago the cap stood at 195,000.
Mr. Wadhwa says the real problem is what he estimates are up to 1.5million skilled immigrants and their families who—thanks to visa quotas, bureaucratic sloth and other roadblocks—are trapped in the limbo between H-1B and the green card that earns them permanent residency and a chance for citizenship. At current green-card approval rates, Mr. Wadhwa tells his students here from India, it will take 70 years for them to gain permanent resident status. Most will eventually leave. They’ll add to a growing brain drain—100,000 skilled immigrants a year from China, India and other nations, Mr. Wadhwa and his team estimate.
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Malone writes often for the Journal about technology. His latest book is The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company (HarperBusiness, 2014).