The incoming Trump administration’s squabbles over the future of high-tech immigration leave me longing for the wisdom of a different US president: Dwight Eisenhower.
No, not the Eisenhower who launched the harsh 1954 crackdown on 1.5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States. President-elect Donald Trump likes that version of Ike just fine.
I was thinking instead about the Eisenhower who said, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.” In other words, don’t nibble around the edges of a problem. To find a solution, think big.
Which brings us to the fight between two of Trump’s key supporters, billionaire Elon Musk and ultranationalist Steve Bannon, over H-1B visas, the temporary work visas used mostly to bring technology workers from other nations to the United States.
The popular program, with 85,000 such visas issued annually, is famously open to abuse. There’s evidence that companies replace US workers with lower-paid H-1B workers. And since the visas are issued to the employers and not the workers, the system puts foreign employees at the mercy of their bosses, who could dismiss troublemakers or refuse to sponsor them for permanent residence in the United States.
Musk admits the H-1B program has been lavishly abused since its establishment in 1990, but he still considers it essential to the health of the US tech sector. So does Trump, who says he’ll protect H-1Bs. But Bannon denounced H-1B as “a scam and a con” and called for the roughly 600,000 visa holders to be deported.
Maybe all three men are thinking too small. The United States has about two dozen visa programs for bringing in skilled workers. And with population growth at a standstill and labor shortages increasing, US businesses must attract foreign workers in many fields — yes, tech, but also health care and manufacturing. So instead of obsessing over H-1B, perhaps we should have a larger conversation about how we import the talent we need.
How about a system that tracks the entire US labor market, pinpoints the sectors where help is most needed, and issues enough visas to fill in the gaps? We’ll have to make sure that the foreign workers don’t become low-cost substitutes for US citizens and that those who want to stay get a fair shot at becoming citizens. A plan for doing this has been floating around for years, and it makes a lot more sense than what we’re doing now.
Just consider the H-1B mess. In its current form “the system is very easy to game,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration researcher at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. In a 2020 research paper, Costa and his colleague Ron Hira show how H-1B workers are supposed to be paid in accordance with the prevailing wage paid for such work in various parts of the country, as determined by the US Department of Labor.
But the visa’s prevailing wage scale allows for lower pay to less experienced workers. Costa and Hira found that many companies ranked most of their H-1B employees in the lower tiers, regardless of their skill levels. This saved the companies thousands in salary per worker.
In 2013, Globe reporter Farah Stockman described how about 20 percent of the visas go not to US companies, but to companies in India who ship the workers to US firms looking for relatively cheap talent.
Even when H-1B employees get their employers to sponsor them for permanent residency, there’s no guarantee they’ll get to stay. Only about a million green cards are issued per year, with just 140,000 of them based on employment.
Stories like these make you wonder whether Bannon had a point. But that needn’t mean raising the drawbridge. Indeed, we can’t afford to. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in July, the United States had 90 workers for every 100 available jobs. The shortage was worse in Massachusetts, where there were only 80 workers for every 100 jobs. Given the falling US birthrate, it’s a shortage that’s bound to get worse.
So let’s come up with a bigger fix for skilled-worker visas.
I’m partial to a proposal first suggested in 2006 by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. They call it a “bridge visa.” It would start with a team of economists who’d estimate the economy’s need for extra workers in many different fields, not just tech. For instance, we face massive shortages of health care workers, ranging from registered nurses to home health care specialists.
Bridge visas could be offered to people in any specialized field where there’s a shortage. This would eliminate the need for two dozen separate visa programs. The economists would annually set the number of visas to be offered, based on demand. The plan would also provide for stricter oversight of worker pay. It might get rid of tiered pay scales and instead require that all visa jobs must pay no less than the median wage for US workers.
Like an H-1B, these bridge visas would be good for three years and renewable for three more. Workers who don’t want to give up foreign citizenship can go home but are free to rejoin the program months or years later. But unlike the H-1B, workers with bridge visas could change jobs at will, giving them bargaining power with their employers. And their applications for green cards won’t need to be sponsored by their employer. That way, they can call out abusive labor practices without risking their shot at citizenship. And there’d be no caps on green cards for people who’d already earned a bridge visa, eliminating those century-long backlogs.
It’s an approach that will outrage anti-immigrationists like Bannon. But most of us would gladly make our peace with the immigrants in our midst, including many of those here illegally. According to a November Pew Research poll, 64 percent of US adults favor finding a way to let them stay — and that includes 43 percent of the people who back Trump’s idea of mass deportations.
A sweeping overhaul of our employment visa system could streamline our immigration bureaucracy, boost the economy, and swell the ranks of high-skilled citizens. It would be a big step forward — big enough even for Ike.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.