ImmigrationTech industry disappointed with lack of details on visas for skilled foreigners
Leaders of the U.S. tech industry hoped President Barack Obama’s recent immigration speech would unveil specifics on how his executive action on immigration would affect the number of highly skilled foreigners who would be granted American work visas. Instead, Obama just mentioned that he would “make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed.”Since Obama did not announce specific plans for the H-1B visa program, tech industry leaders will now push for more congressional support – even though the House did not bring to a vote a bi-partisan Senate bill which would have increased visas for skilled workers to at least 115,000.
Foreign worker visas not what was hoped for // Source: afrigatenews.net
Leaders of the U.S. tech industry hoped President Barack Obama’s recent immigration speech would unveil specifics on how his executive action on immigration would affect the number of highly skilled foreigners who would be granted American work visas. Instead, Obama just mentioned that he would “make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed.”
The San Francisco Gate reports that the tech industry wants the federal government to expand the H-1B visa program, which each year grants temporary work visas to 65,000 highly skilled foreigners and 20,000 immigrants who are graduates of U.S. colleges. “There were no specifics,” said Carl Guardino, head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), a trade association which represents 390 of Silicon Valley’s top companies. “I don’t know whether to applaud or boo. Whenever a politician doesn’t offer any specifics I get worried.”
Members of the SVLG claim there is a shortage of skilled tech workers in the United States, and the H-1B visa program helps them attract top foreign workers. Critics, however, insist that employers prefer foreign workers because they can hire and retain them at a lower cost. More than 50 percent of the H-1B visas granted last year went to offshore outsourcing firms, according to research by Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technologyin New York.
Norman Matloff, a University of California-Davis professor of computer science and critic of the tech industry’s concerns about a tech labor shortage, believes the H-1B visa program does not attract the best and brightest from around the world. “Compared to Americans of the same education and age, the former foreign students turn out to be weaker than, or at most comparable to, the Americans in terms of salary, patent applications, Ph.D. dissertation awards, and quality of the doctoral program in which they studied,” Matloff wrote last year in a study for the Economic Policy Institute.
Since Obama did not announce specific plans for the H-1B visa program, tech industry leaders will now push for more congressional support. Immigration advocates believe they have bipartisan support in Congress for expanding the H-1B visa program, but the San Francisco Gate notes that last year when the Democratic-dominated Senate passed legislation which would have increased visas for skilled workers to at least 115,000, the Republican-led House blocked the bill.
