Forbes (Opinion)
By Kevin Murnane
August 17, 2017
Donald Trump reacts to people he fears, doesn’t like, doesn’t agree with or doesn’t understand by calling them names and trying to banish them from his world. He tweets invective. He fires people to make them go away. He wants to build walls and impose travel bans to keep people out. Trump has only been President for seven months but there are already signs his exclusionary anti-immigration rhetoric and policies may do long-term damage to the American economy by weakening the technological infrastructure on which every aspect of the economy rests.
The need for international workers
Long before Trump, a report issued in 2011 by the Partnership for a New American Economy stated,
America’s dynamic, free, and open economy has for more than two centuries acted as a powerful magnet for the world’s brightest and most creative minds. This is the American tradition. Each generation, millions of talented people from around the world take the risk of leaving their homes to seek a better life at our shores. And the American economy benefits enormously from the contributions of these hard-working, innovative individuals.
In support of this claim, the report noted that 40% of the companies in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Examples include General Electric, Ford, Disney, AT&T, Boeing, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, Google, Home Depot and UPS.
Immigrants and their children may have made essential contributions to the American economy in the past, but why does the US need international workers now? Because there are not enough qualified native-born Americans to fill one of the country’s greatest employment needs.
Almost everything in our lives depends on software and the infrastructure it runs on to one degree or another. The production, transportation and consumption of goods and services would grind to a halt if computers disappeared overnight. Your food, your clothes, your job, the things you buy, almost every man-made thing you see, hear, taste and touch during the course of your day wouldn’t be there without computers. Software and hardware engineers write the code and maintain the infrastructure on which our daily lives depend. The American economy rests on the people who fill these jobs and it has become increasingly clear that the computer science professionals who are qualified to do this work are in short supply.
In 2013 the White House reported that the “Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020 [the year Trump’s four-year term ends] there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs.” The National Center for Education reported that in 2015 there were 59,581 computer science degrees given in the US which is enough to cover approximately 11% of the 530,472 open computer science jobs reported by Code.org. Not all of these open jobs are entry level positions, but it is almost certainly the case that more than 11% of them are.
The gap between computer science jobs and computer science degrees has been covered in large part by the estimated 500,000 international workers with H-1B visas who were working in the US in 2016. The need for “these hard-working, innovative individuals” from outside the US is as great now as it has ever been.
Employers’ and job seekers’ reactions to Trump’s anti-immigration views
Trump’s views on immigration are having a chilling effect on the recruitment of talented international workers. International job seekers are showing less interest in American jobs than they did before Trump was elected. American companies have pulled back from hiring international workers out of concern they will have a difficult time recruiting or keeping qualified people if Trump has his way. More and more workers with H-1B visas who hold computer science jobs in the US are looking for jobs outside the country since Trump took office.
The international job-market firm Hired reports that between Q2 and Q4 2016 there was a 60% year over year decline in requests from American companies to interview international workers. Interest has increased since then, but interview requests were still down 37% in Q2 2017 compared to the previous year. American companies are reluctant to hire qualified international workers in the hostile and uncertain climate introduced by Trump.
Interest in American jobs from individuals who qualify for H-1B visas has also declined since Trump took office. Data from Indeed, another international job-market company, indicates that interest in US jobs from H-1B job seekers increased 600% from July 2014 to January 2017. After Trump took office in January, interest has declined by almost 30%.
As reported by Fortune, a spokesperson for Indeed notes that H-1B job interest typically peaks in February, declines until April, and then rises sharply. With Trump in the White House, interest began to decrease in January, continued to decline into May, and has remained low through early July.
Fortune also reports that more than 70% of H-1B visas granted during the past ten years went to applicants from India, and that most of these jobs were in computer science and IT. Searches for US jobs from India through Indeed in July 2017 were 31% lower than July 2016, and H-1B applications from India declined in FY 2017 for the first time since 2009 according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. And it’s not only India. Applications for H-1B visas from the top 20 applying countries in FY 2017 was less than half what it was in 2007 and less than every year since 2007.
Not only are fewer Indians looking for jobs in the US since Trump became president, but many of the Indians who are currently holding computer science and IT positions in the US are thinking about leaving. Deloitte reports that roughly 600 Indians working in the US were looking for jobs in India in December 2016. By the end of March 2017, there were approximately 7,000 Indians with jobs in the US who were looking for a job back home.
Any one of these trends considered alone is not alarming. However, when taken together, the trends all point in the same direction. Highly qualified international workers who fill jobs that are essential to the American economy are losing interest in American jobs and are seeking employment elsewhere. This is cause for concern.
What does this mean for the future?
The trends showing a loss of interest in US jobs by international workers and a reluctance to recruit international workers by US companies since Trump was elected suggest but do not necessitate future problems for the US economy. Seven months of Trump is not a very long time and trends can reverse.
However, if the current trends don’t reverse, the US economy will almost certainly suffer. If US employers continue to shy away from international workers, qualified international job seekers continue to lose interest in American jobs, and international workers who have jobs in the US continue to look for jobs elsewhere, essential jobs in the US will either remain unfilled or will be filled by less qualified or unqualified workers. This will not only be a problem for the technology sector, it will be a problem for the entire US economy because every sector depends on computers.
It’s difficult to come from behind. The best you can hope for is that the guys ahead of you make unforced errors that give you the opportunity to catch up. Trump appears to be making those errors and countries like Canada, France and Mexico are actively trying to come from behind by capitalizing on them. The more ground the US loses, the harder it will be to come back.
Thus far, Trump appears to have little knowledge or understanding of the world that exists outside his Tower, his golf courses, and his favorite cable news shows. Unfortunately, what looks like America First inside Trump’s world could turn out to be America Close To Last in the real world.
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