The coming debate over immigration reform promises to be thorny, but one change should be simple: increasing the number of H-1B visas available for high-skilled foreign workers. Business groups around the country, including the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, are right to press lawmakers to lift the restrictive yearly cap on H-1B visas as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system.
For Boston’s innovative firms to compete with companies abroad, they need to recruit the best talent available. That’s difficult to do when US-born workers in skilled sectors are being snapped up quickly — the unemployment rate for Americans with advanced science, technology, engineering, and math degrees is less than 4 percent — and when existing law doesn’t let foreign workers fill the demand. Just 65,000 H-1B visas are made available each year. In 2012, all were handed out within three months.
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I'll match you and up the ante. We should create a new visa that promises permanent residency and even citizenship if an immigrant comes to the US, starts a new business and hires a minimum number of legal workers. Many Silicon Valley startups were founded by Asian immigrants. Let's attract more.
Or . . . . . we could encourage American entrepreneurs more significantly to do the same things. Why encourage immigrants to come to the USA to do what we should be able to do ourselves? (And I'm not anti-immigrant, but I do have my doubts about the H-1B program, always have.)
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Allowing mostly accomplished people into is the antithesis of what America has been all about. It was the "tired and poor" who came and grabbed at the opportunity to make something of their lives, or at least their children's lives. We need an influx of immigrants badly. Our lower birthrate combined with lower immigration will cost us dearly in the future.
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Your prejudices distort you view of the population situation, which is of great concern to many economists and demographers.
Maintaining a healthy balance between workers and the retired/elderly is vital to our economy. Our birthrate is in decline and that ratio can't be maintained without immigration. A few engineers or programmers do not solve the problem, which would be much worse today if it weren't for illegal aliens.
The demographic problem is worldwide, but population growth is highest in underdeveloped countries. Because we're still a desirable destination for immigrants from poorer nations, we can draw the large numbers of workers we need now, but maybe not later. It's much more complex than I've written here, and I'm no expert in economics or demographics.
Nevertheless, sloganeering about illegal immigrants and all the American jobs they're supposedly taking is a mindless oversimplification of a complex situation. Just because you say it ad nauseum doesn't make it true.
The article doesn't mention the problems with the current H1B visas. H1B visas tethers a person to a company and in places has created “modern indentured servants.” For example, in Massachusetts, we graduate thousands of teachers from our excellent colleges and universities each year. Last summer at a UP Charter in Boston, 4,100 certified teachers interviewed for 58 positions. When Pioneer Charter School of Science in Everett open up 16 teaching positions were filled from outside the United States. We have qualified unemployed teachers right here in Massachusetts. Also, the school used public education funds to pay the $84,215 on legal and immigration-related fees.
How many of the original 16 Pioneer teachers with temporary H1B visas were certified to teach in Massachusetts? How many had taken and passed the MTEL. How many were teaching on a waiver? How many were teaching in their subject area?
Recent research by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) finds over half (54%) of all workers brought in through the H1B visa program are being paid at the lowest level. Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations noted, “hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers into the US each year on H1B, B-1, and L1 visas and then treats them like modern indentured servants: they are tied to a particular employer with little bargaining leverage or workplace rights and paid an artificially low wage. The H1B sets the minimum wage for this imported talent at a mere 17% of the prevailing US wage; the L-1 visa, for transfer of employees within companies, has no wage floor, allowing firms to continue to pay home-country wages. This means that some Indian engineers are working in the US for as little as $8,000/year plus expenses.”
After I read the GAO article, I wondered about the 16 foreign born Pioneer Charter School of Science teachers. Were these new comers to Massachusetts “modern indentured servants”? Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and we have laws in Massachusetts! If the school was opened Monday thru Saturday, 7:30am to 5:30pm, how long was a teacher’s workday and week? What were their salaries? Where did they live? Since only 4 remain in the current school, where are the other 12 teachers now? Have these teachers returned to Turkey? Why? Are these teachers at a sister charter school in the United States? What school are these teachers working in? What are they getting paid? Since Pioneer Charter has been open since 2007, why isn’t the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between Pioneer teachers and the charter school on the MADOE site?
I wrote more about this here:
http://bluemassgroup.com/2013/03/outsourcing-massachusetts-charter-school-teaching-jobs-say-it-isnt-so/
Links:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d1126.pdf
http://smlr.rutgers.edu/modern-indentured-servants