BLOOMBERG (Opinion)
By Evan Soltas
October 23, 2012
For "a nation of
immigrants," the U.S. is denying entry to a lot of
foreigners who want to come here and would do a lot to grow
our economy.
Just last month, Congress
blocked a plan to offer more permanent-residency visas (green cards) to foreign doctorate and master's-degree
students in science and technology fields. Republicans
deliberately set up the bill to fail -- a bill which they
ostensibly supported -- hoping to score political points and
elicit campaign contributions from the technology industry,
a Democratic-leaning constituency.
Republicans proposed to
offer green cards to STEM (science, technology, engineering
and mathematics) students who train at American universities
and want to stay here and work, but they didn't want to
increase the total number of immigration visas. So they made
Democrats an offer they couldn't accept: They proposed to
eliminate a visa program Democrats favor, a "diversity visa"
which each year admits 55,000 people from countries that do
not have large immigrant populations here.
With 60 percent of House
members voting in favor, Republicans could still have easily
passed the bill, H.R. 6249, through the House. But just to
make sure it would be a political football instead of an
actual law, they took it up "under suspension of the rules,"
a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority, and so it
never got to the Senate. Keep in mind that this is the same
House where Republicans have passed symbolic legislation to
repeal the Affordable Care Act more than 30 times.
Given the tepid economic
recovery, it’s sad that Congress cannot enact a pro-growth
immigration policy. Giving citizenship or permanent
residency to more high-skilled immigrants is perhaps the
single-easiest way to grow the American economy. Science and
technology companies face labor shortages in their
industries, preventing expansion, and the students
themselves want to stay here and make valuable contributions
to research and business. All we have to do is let these
people stay here and let American companies hire them.
The cost of failing to do
so is large, as the American technology industry is deeply
dependent on the talent of high-skilled immigrants. More
than 20 percent of all Americans with degrees in science and
engineering are foreign-born, meaning that immigrants are
two-times overrepresented in these fields. It's even more
concentrated in computer science and engineering: Immigrants
make up almost a third of all degree holders in these
sectors, both of which currently face severe shortages of
talent.
The best economic research
on high-skilled immigration, recently assembled here by the
Kauffman Foundation, suggests extensive economic gains from
growing America’s stock of human capital. For just one
example, a disproportionate fraction of American startups
and patents -- and that means jobs, too -- come from the
entrepreneurship and ingenuity of our immigrants.
A new STEM visa program
would be good, but it would be better to simply expand the
number of green cards issued based on "employment-based
preferences." These visas go to immigrants who come here to
do work with outstanding qualifications in their fields.
They are scientists of "sustained national or international
acclaim and recognition." They are the world's best teachers
and researchers, who want to work in our universities. They
are holders of advanced degrees with five years or more of
professional experience or have at least two years' worth of
training in specialized fields.
And yet, we only admit
about 140,000 of them a year. That's just 13 percent of the
total number of permanent-residency visas granted in 2011.
Why on Earth do we not want this talent? The world's
brightest want to bring their human capital to the U.S., and
we turn them away. All we have to do is open the door: These
employment immigration visa programs are routinely
oversubscribed, and the number of visas available has not
grown in ten years, as shown by the accompanying graph.
Let's hope we don't realize
the magnitude of our error only when we stop winning Nobel
prizes in science, or when the next tech breakthrough comes
from a graduate of an American university who we've forced
to live and work abroad. If the U.S. wants to lead the world
in research and innovation, we have to let the innovators
come here and work.
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