Skilled migrants face visa hurdles

The legal immigration system is so backed up it is setting up what researchers call a “reverse brain-drain,” forcing some of the nation’s best inventors and entrepreneurs, who are foreign workers, to leave the country.

A report issued last week by the Kauffman Foundation says while Congress has been fighting over illegal aliens and a guest-worker program for low-skilled workers, a crisis is developing among those waiting in line to become legal immigrants to the country.

More than 1 million skilled workers and their families already are in the United States competing for about 120,000 permanent resident visas each year, and many of those say they may just return to their home countries instead, the researchers said.

“The whole immigration debate in the public mind to date has concentrated largely on low-skilled immigrants, and in the course of debating it, we’ve turned away and haven’t focused on this pool of high-skilled immigrants,” said Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

“There’s a huge visa backlog and a lot of people may be threatened with having to go home, which from our vantage point seems like a preposterous result,” he said.

Immigrants, it turns out, play a huge, and increasing, role in American science and technology, according to two earlier reports from the researchers. Those reports measured patents registered by immigrants and technology and engineering companies founded by immigrants.

Between 1995 and 2005, for example, one in four technology or engineering companies was founded by an immigrant, with Indian immigrants accounting for more new companies than the next four — Britain, China, Japan and Taiwan — combined.

The researchers said the threat of a reverse brain-drain is real — they found that about one in three workers here on employment-based visas either plans to leave the United States or is uncertain about remaining.

About half of the 1 million hopefuls waiting for a permanent visa are workers, and the other half are their family members.

The Senate this year tried to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, but the bill foundered over concerns that too little was being done to enforce the laws, illegal aliens were being granted amnesty and guest workers would drive down wages of U.S. workers.

Some high-skilled foreign workers complained that the bill treated illegal aliens better than legal, high-skilled workers already here and waiting for green cards, or legal permanent residence. They said illegal aliens would not be limited by their country of origin, so millions of illegal alien workers from Mexico could gain a path to citizenship while those legally waiting in line would still be subject to country-by-country limits.

The H-1B or L visa programs are the paths many high-skilled workers use to enter the country on a temporary basis, with the hope they eventually earn permanent legal residence. The bill the Senate was debating earlier this year would have raised the annual cap on H1-B workers from 65,000 to 115,000 and would have exempted from the cap foreign students who earn master’s degrees or higher from a U.S. university.

Some U.S.-based organizations representing engineers and technology workers, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, say the H-1B program hurts American workers by allowing businesses to import workers at cheaper wages. They argue the program lacks safeguards to make sure business aren’t using foreign workers to undercut American workers.

One alternative supported by the Kauffman Foundation and IEEE would be to try to keep the brightest immigrants here permanently, by offering permanent residence to foreign students who graduate with high-level degrees in science or technology.