April's Fools for Global Creatives

OK, so I'm a couple of  week's late. But over at TCS Daily, Ilya Shapiro, a Canadian working as a lawyer and writer in Washington DC, provides a personal perspective on America's bad joke of an immigration policy.

"Because April 1 was a Sunday, the day exposing the foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy fell on April 2 this year. This is the day when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions with the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas. ...The problem is that there aren't enough of these visas: Congress limits the number of H-1Bs that can be granted each year, and that magic number has been set at 65,000 for four years now. Before that, and in response to the technology boom of the late '90s, Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the cap has been reached earlier and earlier each year since. In 2005, that meant August. Last year, it was May 26. This year, the cap was reached on... April 2 -- the very first day you could file. Yes, by that Monday afternoon, USCIS had received over 150,000 H-1B applications. Officials quickly announced that it would randomly select 65,000 petitions from all those it had received April 2 and April 3."

Ugh......

As for the vast majority of employers and employees who were out of luck, the immigration laws said, like so many Cubs fans on what was also baseball's opening day, "wait till next year."

 

Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold until October 1, 2008—the day that people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal year 2009 can start work.

 

Now, why do I care about this issue so much? Because I myself am a foreign professional. No, not an engineer or scientist—haven't taken math since high school. I'm actually a lawyer, and I do quite a bit of political law right here in Washington, DC.

 

What helps me is that I come from Canada—my parents took a wrong turn at the St. Lawrence when we immigrated from the Soviet Union—which gets a special provision of un-capped visas under NAFTA. Still, these NAFTA visas are only good for one year at a time, and I have to maintain the legal fiction that after getting my education in the US and living my entire adult life here, I have no intention of staying permanently.

 

But at least I get to be here, tenuous as my grasp on the American dream may be. As the H-1B petition statistics demonstrate, there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people with job offers in America who cannot realize their dreams in their home countries. These are people who, like my engineer parents, want a better life for their children and see the United States as a bastion of freedom and rule of law in an unruly time. They aim to leave places that, while not always oppressing them, have sclerotic economic systems less conducive to entrepreneurship and growth than America (India, France, most of the world).

 

Yet neither the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act the Senate passed last year nor the STRIVE Act, a bill now pending before the House that combines increased border security with a guest-worker program, contemplates the doctors, scientists, and software developers (forget lawyers and pundits!) the country needs. And, as I said before, even those in that category who make it here have to leave just as they've planted roots and become increasingly assimilated.

 

Thus America continues to maintain an incomprehensible and counter-productive immigration policy, damaging both pocketbooks and heartstrings from Silicon Valley to the Bay of Bengal. And unless Congress and the White House do something to fundamentally reshape immigration rules with respect to skilled workers (let alone the hard-working gardeners and construction workers who get all the news coverage) things will only get worse.

 

I just hope I get married—absurdly, the only route to permanent residence open to people like me—before I have to leave the country.

 

If only this were all a bad April Fools' joke.

Comments

[Chris L]

Good old US of A. Always finding new and better ways to accelerate brain drain.

[A B]

As an international PhD student at one of this country's premier institutions, I was not sure until now whether I would go back to my home country after finishing. America's immigration policy might make this decision easy for me. I came to a very simple conclusion recently. If there is a problem with gaining a work permit, I will have no regrets packing my bags and going back. America has been very good to me so far, but I would rather not stay here anymore if the US government policy indicates that I am not welcome here.