The Hill
(Op-Ed)
By Rosario Marin
July 6, 2015
Donald
Trump is doubling down on his race-baiting attacks on Mexico. Over the
weekend, the Republican presidential hopeful had a public fallout with
Univision when he
informed the Spanish-language television network he was banning their
executives from his Miami golf resort next door to the network’s
offices. The move came on the heels of Univision dropping out of Trump’s
Miss USA pageant, a decision it made after Trump
remarked that Mexico is “sending people that have a lot of problems,”
that “are bringing drugs and crime [and] rapists” to the United States.
Trump has since refused to apologize for what many are calling racist comments.
The
national conversation sparked by Trump’s controversial foray into the
presidential race has added to my growing concern that we as a country
are drifting far off-course
regarding immigration, seeing only trees in a vast, vast forest.
The
world economy is rapidly changing, and our immigration laws are not
keeping time with economic progress at great detriment to the future of
the United States. Our
immigration system needs to be reformed to address the needs of our
industries, whether for low or high-skilled people. Certainly there is a
fight going on for American businesses to hire the highly skilled
individuals they need to keep competitive in the
increasingly digital economy, a fight that we are losing.
We’ve
known for many years now about the growth potential of the tech sector,
but we had no idea that it would outpace other sectors so quickly.
There simply aren’t enough
native-born people to fill highly specialized STEM field vacancies, and
yet, as the industry matures, critical positions seem to multiply.
Despite our steadily climbing reliance on the technology sector, we are
as yet unable to meet growing industry demand
through domestically sourced talent.
For
example, as is the case with many STEM education programs at American
universities, more than half of the graduate students enrolled at the
University of Texas’s Cockrell
School of Engineering are foreign-born, and nearly a third of them will
be forced to turn down opportunities to work at American tech
companies. And so, newly minted diploma in hand, much of our
domestically educated but foreign-born talent pool is asked to
leave the country following graduation because there are too few visas
to satisfy demand. The majority of them will return to their home or
other countries where they will utilize their top-tier American
education for the benefit of the U.S.’s global competitors.
Additionally,
the infrastructure that supports our technology sector much more
readily crosses borders than the brick and mortar factories of Detroit
and other cities
that have seen job flight over the last few decades. If we don’t do
something soon, we may wake up tomorrow to find that the next or even
current era of tech companies have set up shop in Dublin or Shanghai.
Microsoft is exemplifying just such a shift with
its decision to open a new training center just across the border in
Vancouver, Canada, only a few hours’ drive from its global headquarters
in Washington State. Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel,
says that the U.S.’s restrictive immigration
regulations “clearly did not meet our needs. We have to look to other
places.”
Other
companies, too, are seeking the more modern immigration regulations to
the north. Amazon, Salesforce, Twitter and Facebook all purchased
additional office space
in Canada and posted numerous job openings to fill the new expansion
efforts. Whether it’s Canada or Costa Rica, major U.S. tech companies
are demonstrating a willingness to shift operations wherever they need
to remain competitive.
To
compound the problem, some American policy-makers, like Mr. Trump, are
looking at immigration in the wrong way. Immigration reform is vital to
sustaining U.S. economic
growth and ensuring American competitiveness through an increased
talent pool of STEM workers, but it also happens to bolster, rather than
detract from, native-born U.S. workers’ incomes.
Since
1990, skilled STEM immigrants have accounted for more than a third of
total U.S. productivity, meeting demand for skilled workers and driving
industry innovation
and productivity. The data show that 187 new American jobs are created
for every 100 H-1B visa holders admitted. That’s real growth. Although
foreign workers bridge the skills gap across all industries, they are
particularly beneficial to the technology sector
as economic growth hinges ever-increasingly on innovation driven by the
latest global thinking.
Bjorn
Billhardt, an immigrant from Germany, in his testimony before the
Senate Judiciary Committee this spring, recounted his story of finding
great success in the United
States, but only because he was lucky enough to have immigrated in the
90s. “Immigrants or their children have founded over 40 percent of
fortune 500 companies. Without immigrant entrepreneurs, the United
States would not be home to companies like Google,
eBay, and Yahoo!,” Billhardt asserts. “It is easy to imagine that if
those companies aren’t grown in the U.S., they would have been created
overseas, and we would have missed out on that innovation and those
American jobs.”
Some
have expressed a fear that expansion of the H-1B program could harm
American workers, but at what cost to American economic power? To stay
at the forefront of today’s
economic growth, we urgently need to work within the modern,
ever-globalizing economy as it exists, and not as some idealists among
us might like to see it.
Translating
this growth into long-term economic benefit for the United States
hinges on our ability to attract the talent that can fill the positions
our evolving economy
needs. Should America’s tech industry continue to outgrow immigration
reform, we may one day be waving reluctantly as it leaves our shores and
goes abroad altogether. Perhaps then, Mr. Trump, you will understand
that technological innovation, much like your
merchandise, can also be “made in China.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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