US Visa Policies Prevent Tech Startups From Hiring Foreign Workers

By Walter Ewing www.immigrationimpact.com

Tech startups are engines of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Yet U.S. visa policies may be preventing startups from hiring the highly skilled foreign professionals they need to succeed.

A new study looks at foreign and U.S.-born workers who recently graduated from American universities. Researchers specifically wanted to see where foreign workers with a PhD in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) got their first jobs after graduating.

Foreign workers are just as likely to apply for and receive job offers from startups as U.S. citizens, the study found. Yet foreign workers are 56% less likely to work for a tech startup once they’ve completed their degree.

This disparity is significant. Roughly half of all doctorate holders in computer science and engineering are strong>foreign-born—meaning that startups are missing out on a large share of the high-skilled workforce.

Cutting out a significant piece of tech startups’ potential labor force hurts the companies (which may struggle to stay afloat with a reduced pool of candidates). But it also means the United States is losing the innovation and job creation that these U.S.-educated foreign workers could bring.

Foreign workers also face difficulties because they may have to depart the United States if they cannot transition from post-graduate training as a student to H-1B status due to the annual limit exceeding the demand—even if a startup is willing to sponsor them for temporary employment. Even when sponsored for permanent employment, foreign nationals face lengthy waits for many employment-based categories, particularly if they were born in China or India.

Many startups are unable to effectively tap into this reservoir of talent because they do not have the resources to complete the laborious process of sponsoring potential foreign workers so they can apply for green cards.

To sponsor a worker, the report estimates that a startup would need to spend between $5,000 to $10,000 in filing and attorney fees complying with the requirements of federal agencies and wait months, if not years, to complete the various stages of the green card process. This is beyond the reach of many small startups that lack dedicated human resources departments.

This means foreign workers just entering the labor force have a better chance of getting a green card if they work for a larger, established company than for a small startup.

After they receive their green card, however, they have much more freedom of movement. The study finds that foreign-born PhDs who get their green cards while working at a larger company are more likely to move on to a startup than to another large company.

Foreign-born PhDs in this country know that startups are where the action is in the high-tech economy. But, in considering their futures, they also need to take into account which companies are best equipped to invest the time and money that is needed to help them secure green cards. Without green cards, they might be unable to work in the United States at all and be obligated to return to their home countries.

Unfortunately, this system leaves startups at a disadvantage—unable to hire a great many talented professionals just as they are graduating from U.S. universities with their STEM doctorates in hand.

Both startups and the U.S. economy would benefit from a green-card application process that is simpler and less expensive than the current process. For example, what if foreign nationals with a U.S. STEM PhD degree could apply for a green card after graduation without being subject to the annual numerical limitations? Doing so would foster innovation, growth, and job creation.

 

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

https://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a4483-US-Visa-Policies-Prevent-Tech-Hiring-Workers.html

The Demand For Highly-Skilled Foreign Workers Is Undeniable

Written by Walter Ewing

There is little doubt that highly skilled natives and immigrants have worked together for years to drive innovation in a broad range of fields and to build America’s private sector. 

However, despite ample evidence of the complementary nature of the work done by highly skilled foreign-born professionals, the anti-immigration community in the United States is once again attempting to cast doubt on the value of their economic contributions. 

One of the latest attacks is a report that calls into question the worth of degrees awarded by colleges and universities virtually anywhere outside of the United States. Yet this attempt by the anti-immigration crowd is marred by the use of an irrelevant data set that in no way measures a foreign-born worker’s professional knowledge or subject matter expertise. 

The data set used in the report comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)—an English-language test of literacy, numerical proficiency, and computer savvy administered in the United States and 23 other countries. PIAAC is not intended as a measure of specialized knowledge in any particular field of study. Rather, it assesses the practical, day-to-day, “core competencies” of adults in reading, writing, math, and using a computer—in English. 

The report finds that, among college-educated natives and immigrants who took the test in the United States in 2012 and 2014, natives significantly outperformed immigrants on all measures. The report also finds that this performance gap persists even for immigrants who have been in the country for more than five years before taking the test and who presumably had time to improve their English-language skills. 

While all of this may be true, the report uses the gap in PIAAC scores to support a conclusion that goes far beyond what PIAAC actually measures. Namely, that “policy-makers should therefore be cautious in treating foreign degrees as evidence of ‘high-skill’ immigration.” 

Yet PIAAC doesn’t measure the specialized skills of degree holders; it only measures core competencies in the use of the English language, numbers, and computers. It does not assess the engineering expertise of an engineer or the sociological expertise of a sociologist. 

If foreign degree holders were as unskilled as the report implies, they would not be in high demand among U.S. employers. But they are. Consider that, each year, the statutory cap on H-1B temporary visas for highly educated foreign professionals is now filled in a matter of days after becoming available. 

On average, H-1B workers earn higher wages than comparable U.S.-born workers, even after accounting for differences in age and occupation. This holds true in fields like computer and information technology, engineering, healthcare, and post-secondary education. In other words, employers aren’t saving money by hiring H-1B workers, which suggests that these workers have skill sets which are in high demand. 

The economic importance of highly skilled foreign workers—who may have earned degrees both here and abroad—is also apparent from their sheer numbers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). They account for over one-third of all software engineers, more than one-quarter of computer programmers, over one-quarter of electrical engineers, nearly half of medical scientists—and the list goes on. Some of these professionals received their higher education in the United States and some did not. But all are in demand. 

In short, the report begs the question of why immigrants with foreign degrees are in such high demand by U.S. employers if they aren’t actually qualified in their fields of study. 

This latest anti-immigrant report misuses PIAAC scores in a cynical attempt to denigrate anyone who received a higher education beyond the borders of the United States. But this attempt doesn’t withstand scrutiny because PIAAC scores were never intended to measure specialized bodies of knowledge that highly skilled foreign professionals possess. Knowledge was not invented in the United States, and there are very knowledgeable people who were actually born in other countries. 

 

Source: http://immigrationimpact.com/ 

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a4051-Highly-Skilled-Foreign-Workers-Is-Undeniablein-in-United-States.html