A visa cap stymies high-skilled foreign workers

Kelvin Tsang came to the United States from China to pursue a dual degree in Business and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He assumed that finding a job would be easy with an Ivy League degree, but Tsang still faces much uncertainty about his career.

 

With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent, having a college degree no longer guarantees a stable and well-paying job. Without a H1-B visa, Tsang has to soon make a decision about whether to stay in the United States or go back to China.

“I’m trying hard to find a job here in the U.S., but it’s really hard to find employers who will sponsor my H1-B visa,” he said. “I change my mind every day about whether I should find a job in China or continue to try my luck here."

Tsang’s dilemma represents a much larger ongoing debate in the United States about the role of high skilled foreign workers. But the caps prevent companies from hiring as many workers as they would like.

The H1-B visa was created in 1990 to attract high-skilled workers from around the world to work in the United States. The number of H1-B visas issued year is determined by Congress with the current annual cap set at 65,000 visas.

“It’s really difficult to tell whether the current cap is correct because there isn’t really any oversight into the entire H1-B process,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at Federation for American Immigration Reform or FAIR, a group that wants to restrict immigration.

 

Technology companies have typically been the major proponents of increasing and even eliminating the H1-B cap. In a testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology in 2008, Bill Gates of Microsoft warned that the United States could lose its technological leadership and urged the committee to allow high-tech companies to hire more skilled foreign workers.

Gates said that Microsoft hires four Americans for supporting roles for every high-skilled H-1B visa holder it hires. Cisco, another technological giant, echoes similar sentiments.

“We have a policy of not issuing H1-B visas for our non-technology positions. But for our technology and engineering roles, we have to consider foreign workers since there are simply not enough U.S. graduates for us to employ” said Robyn Marsh, a recruiter from Cisco.

Beyond technology companies, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also is a strong advocate for increasing the H1-B cap.

In a speech in September at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce offices in Washington, D.C. Bloomberg called for eliminating the cap for H-1B visas.

"Our immigration policy is a form of national suicide. … We ship [these students] home where they can take what they learned here and use it to create companies and products that compete with ours," Bloomberg said.

As the U.S. economy becomes weaker, it has taken much longer for the H1-B cap to be filled. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it only took three days for the H1-B cap to be snapped up in 2008 compared to 8 months in 2010.

Polly Yu, a graduate student studying engineering in CUNY, is hoping she will get a visa.

 

“If I don’t find a job by the time I graduate next year, I will return to China. There are many good jobs for me there," she said.

Roy Beck, President of Numbers USA, argues that United States is still an attractive place for foreign workers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, almost 70 percent of international students who graduate from U.S. universities continue to stay in the United States.

He said foreign workers dominate the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.

“With so many STEM jobs given to foreign workers, this reduces the incentive for U.S. students to study STEM fields. If there was a greater commitment to recruit more local STEM graduates, more students would study Science and Engineering,” he said.

Ruark of FAIR also said technology companies are hiring foreign workers at lower than the prevailing wage.

 

"This is not fair to foreign or U.S. workers,” he said.

According to the National Science Foundation, there are 2.5 times more local STEM graduates than jobs available.

 

Congress raised the H1-B cap to 195,000 during the technology boom in the mid-1990’s to attract more foreign technology workers, but that cap never got filled. It is often difficult for Congress to gauge the actual demand for H1-B visas.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 20 percent of H1-B visa applications are fraudulent or violate rules.

 

One of the biggest victims of the H1-B visa is older, local workers, said Bruce McKennon, a 51 year old resident of New York, who worked at a small technology firm that went out of business in 2005.

 

“I have a computer science degree and have not been able to find a job for the last five years," he said. "I am older and so IT companies would rather hire a cheaper and younger foreign worker than me.”

 

Xiao Jing, a graduate student studying energy and policy at Columbia University, said she would work in the United States if she could get a H1-B visa.