H-1B Visa Policy

The Washington Post published today an article about the H-1B visa program and how its benefits and problems affect immigrants, employers and American workers.  The article is fairly short but it compresses the feelings of the three major stakeholders in the H-1B visa program debate.

The U.S. Employers
The H-1B program was designed to help U.S. companies obtain temporary skilled foreign workers to assist in projects for which there is a shortage of U.S. workers.  During the dot-com boom, most of these H-1B visas were used by software companies attracting talented software engineers from India, China, or eastern Europe.  Today, many of these H-1B visas are used by a more diverse group of U.S. employers, but software engineers are still among the highest in demand.

Based on the number of applications for this year’s H-1B season, 163,000, compared to last year’s number of 140,000, the demand for skilled foreign labor is strong and getting stronger. According to the Post article, companies, “offer the same salaries and perks whether you’re from Baltimore or Bangladesh . . . but [they] simply cannot find enough qualified U.S.-born staff to fuel [their] growth.”

The Foreign Talent
Foreign skilled workers’ stake in the H-1B visa program is often distorted.  The Post article highlights how many of these skilled workers come to the U.S. on H-1B visa and use the H-1B visa’s “dual intent” status to start a procedure of obtaining a permanent residency.  This, after all, is how this great country was built, and such influx of talent should not only be temporary, for the duration of the H-1B visa of six years, but should be made permanent to that the U.S. economy, as a whole, benefits.

The Critics
There are critics of the H-1B program, of course, and the Post article outlines their position.  Some critics consider the H-1B program a “cheap labor” allowing U.S. businesses to hire and sometimes exploit foreign workers who come to the U.S. and often have little or no bargaining power.  While such comments are justified in certain occasions and based on past cases by some employers, such cases seem to be limited to few individual employers and the Department of Labor is tasked with ensuring that no wage discrimination and workplace abuse takes place.

Conclusion
The debate about the benefits and disadvantages of the H-1B program will continue for as long as the program exists.  In economic slowdown, it is easy to point the finger to foreign workers as taking away jobs from qualified American workers.  But we should not lose sight of the greater benefit to the economy caused by the constant influx of educated foreigners who allow U.S. companies to stay competitive in a global economy.