Reforms urged on visa quota

Researchers say the size of the nation’s high-skilled labor force has stagnated in the past 30 years and urged the government to reform visa quotas to bring in more foreign talent to ease the workload.

30 years and urged the government to reform visa quotas to bring in more foreign talent to ease the workload.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a District-based think tank, released research last week showing this decline could harm the nation’s economic competitiveness.

Project researcher Jacob Funk Kirkegaard said the share of Americans ages 25 to 34 who possess high-end job skills is lower now than when baby boomers entered the work force.

To fill the gap once the baby boomers retire, Mr. Kirkegaard said, the U.S. government should abolish the 65,000 annual limit on temporary-worker visas, which he said is circumvented, topping 275,000 in two recent years.

He proposed instead tying the number of temporary visa holders to a set share of a company’s total work force. Mr. Kirkegaard said information technology and other industries especially need workers from China and India, which have large high-skilled labor forces.

National Association of Manufacturers spokesman Hank Cox agreed, saying the biggest problem facing manufacturing industries is the shortage of skilled workers, and he urged the government to increase the numbers of H1-B and L-1 visas that let foreigners stay as temporary workers.

High-skilled workers “are not the people who are going to cause security problems,” Mr. Cox said.

Conference participants who doubted the Peterson diagnosis called it too pessimistic and said it failed to take into account the full range of economic factors, including U.S. strength in other parts of the labor market.

Francisco Gonzalez, Latin American politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, criticized the proposals as self-serving, especially its effort to retain foreign students who receive postgraduate education in the United States.

“Establishing a system that seeks to retain people trained in U.S. universities is greedy” and contrary to U.S. interests, Mr. Gonzalez said. “These students could be good diplomats” for the United States and business contacts in their native countries.

In response, Mr. Kirkegaard said, “Nothing that I am saying today should be used as advocating high-skilled immigrants” as a substitute for education reform.

“We need to do both of them,” Mr. Kirkegaard said.