Immigration Reforms Fail to Satisfy Silicon Valley

Financial Times

By Barney Jopson

November 23, 2014

Immigration reforms fail to satisfy Silicon Valley 

The White House is projecting that most of the economic benefits from its immigration reform will come from highly-skilled workers, but dissatisfied tech groups say the initiative does not do enough to help them recruit foreign programmers and engineers.

 

President Barack Obama used his executive powers last week to remove the deportation threat hanging over nearly 5m unauthorised immigrants, and took smaller steps to address longstanding complaints from Silicon Valley about US visa backlogs.

 

The measures for the tech sector are at the heart of White House claims about the economic impact of its move, but tech lobbyists said the Obama administration's plans lacked critical details and had been oversold.

 

“What the president is planning to do will buy us more time and enable us to stay afloat a bit longer, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the fact the ship is sinking,” said Scott Corley, executive director of Compete America, a coalition that includes Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

 

The concerns of tech groups are important because, while the administration claims its action will boost US output by 0.4 to 0.9 per cent after ten years, 0.3 to 0.7 per cent is supposed to come from high-skill immigration.

 

In particular, the White House expects a big boost to the productivity of all US workers by bringing in more foreign entrepreneurs and technologists. Its own figures, however, show the majority of extra workers will not be new immigrants but the spouses of existing H-1B high-skill visa holders, who are not necessarily highly-skilled themselves.

 

Such measures do not satisfy tech groups, which have long complained that the US’s sclerotic legal immigration system is stifling their growth by stopping them hiring the programmers they need.

 

Intel says that at US universities where it recruits, more than half of graduates with advanced degrees in engineering, science and maths are foreign-born but struggle to get work visas or residency permits. US labour unions dispute claims of labour shortages.

 

Mr Corley said: “We believe the president’s commitment, we trust his sincerity, but we’re not seeing the kind of detail we want to see at this stage to fully assess what it means for us.”

“For years Republicans and Democrats have shown the same amount of sincerity and said that they want to fix the highly-skilled visa system – and a decade later it’s not done.”

 

Another tech lobbyist said industry needs had been eclipsed by the weight of demands over unauthorised immigrants, a group that arouses great sympathy in the Democratic base and divides Republicans.

 

“There’s only so many people and so much time. This wasn’t their priority,” he said.

Tech groups had urged the White House to free up more permanent residency permits, or green cards, by “recapturing” some 200,000 unused in previous years, and by not counting family members towards the annual allotment of 140,000 work-based green cards. But the White House did not acquiesce.

 

The measures it did announce on highly-skilled workers included plans to allow people who are already in the US on work visas to change jobs if they have had green cards approved but are waiting – often many years – for them to become available. It said it would give some of their spouses the right to work too.

 

The Obama administration also proposed to extend an on-the-job training programme for foreign students of science, technology, engineering or mathematics coming out of US universities, which helps companies to recruit graduates. But Mr Corley said the impact would depend on the details of rules that were yet to be written.

 

Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, another lobby group, said: “While we appreciate the president’s efforts to address the problems in our employment-based system, and look forward to further details, it is disappointing that neither he nor Congress have been able to seize the opportunity to accelerate economic growth by fixing our broken immigration system.”

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