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 United States Must Embrace Global Talent, As High-Skilled Foreign Workers Go Elsewhere

 

Written by Walter Ewing

If the U.S. government closes the door to highly skilled foreign workers, other countries stand ready to embrace their contributions. For instance, while the Trump administration contemplates an overhaul of the H-1B temporary employment visa, a process that would make it more difficult to obtain them, the Canadian government is offering the opposite. Canada is promising a two-week turn-around time on work permits for skilled foreign workers who are in the United States, but who might like to try Canada instead.

The U.S. government and employers must create a welcoming environment that attracts skilled people from around the world, because the United States is no longer the default choice for foreign workers looking for new opportunities. 

This is one of the central conclusions of a new book, “The Gift of Global Talent, ” by Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. 

The book synthesizes much of the existing research on high-skilled immigration and reaches a number of important conclusions. Paramount among these is that “talent is the world’s most precious resource.” The accuracy of this statement becomes apparent if you consider that computers, cars, and factories would not exist if not for the creativity of engineers and other high-tech professionals. 

Moreover, talent is highly mobile. Talented workers can readily travel to any corner of the globe where opportunity beckons to them—meaning that forward-looking nations must actively compete for these workers and not take them for granted. 

“The Gift of Global Talent” argues that one unique feature of talented individuals is that they tend to congregate in a relatively small number of places—like Silicon Valley, or equivalent locations in Canada, Europe, and Asia. 

Contrary to conventional economic thinking, this tendency to collect in one city doesn’t drive down wages or produce a surplus of workers. Rather, it makes the place even more attractive to other talented professionals. In Kerr’s terminology, this process gives birth to “talent clusters”—and it is the talent clusters that fuel innovation. 

As the author notes, the degree to which foreign-born workers contribute to the growth of these clusters is readily apparent in a couple of statistics. Immigrants account for one-quarter of all U.S. patents filed. And more than half of all U.S. workers with doctorates in science and engineering fields are immigrants. 

The talent clusters that have taken root in the United States would not exist in their present form without immigration. Likewise, these immigrants would not have been able to come without visas specifically designed for highly skilled professionals, such as the H-1B. 

To succeed in such a global labor market, businesses must be nimble; quick to follow new ideas and attract the workers needed to develop those new ideas. For this reason, many businesses very deliberately set up shop in the middle of a talent cluster so that they will have ready access to whatever sort of talented workers are needed as the business moves forward. 

The primary obstacle to getting the workers they need rests in the inefficiencies of the U.S. employment visa system (particularly flaws in the H-1B, such as the fact that the visa is tied to a single employer and is not “portable” if the worker wants to get a different job in a different company). These obstacles would only increase with changes to the visa’s availability being contemplated by the Trump administration. 

At a broader level, the administration’s anti-immigrant policies have already caused the United States to lose some of its luster as a home for global talent. This is an economically self-destructive course of action that must be reversed. Workers who possess knowledge and ingenuity transcend borders. Rational immigration policies would recognize this basic fact. 

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3922-United-States-must-support-foreign-workers.html