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11.07

SIA Joins with IEEE-USA on Immigration Reform

By Russ Harrison

IEEE-USA President John Meredith and the Semiconductor Industry of America (SIA) President George Scalise sent a join letter to Congress on 11 October outlining a common position on skill-based immigration reform. The letter was sent to House leaders from both parties in an attempt to influence an on-going debate over high-skill immigration reform.

The joint letter highlights agreement between the two associations on the importance of federally-funded research, improved K-12 education, a greater commitment to undergraduate education in STEM fields, and the permanent extension of the R&D tax credit.

But the bulk of the letter focuses on the EB visa program. EB visas are permanent residency visas (green cards) available to foreigners with advanced degrees or advanced skills.

To date, most of the high-skill immigration debate in Congress has focused on the H-1B program, which is not an immigration visa. Rather, the H-1B is a temporary visa that allows workers into the country for six years, during which time they can apply for an EB visa, but are not guaranteed to receive one.

The Problem

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issues some 140,000 H-1B visas each year (including those that don’t count against the program’s 85,000 visa cap), while EB visas are limited to 60,000 workers annually. The imbalance between the two programs has yielded a cumulative backlog of some 500,000 people who are here on an H-1B visa while waiting for an EB visa to become available. On average, the wait for an EB visa exceeds five years.

Contributing to the backlog are country quotas, which limit the numbers of EB visas issued to citizens of any one country each year. The number of EB visas issued to people from India and China — two primary exporters of high-tech talent — are limited to roughly 9,000 annually. In contrast, the H-1B has no such country caps. Consequently, Indian and Chinese workers comprise half of the current EB backlog of applicants who face a wait of a decade or more.

Instead of a predictable process where skilled foreigners are quickly made permanent legal residents, the system traps foreign workers in a legal limbo for years. While they are on an H-1B awaiting their EB visa, workers cannot switch jobs, or even accept a promotion. Doing so would cost the worker their place in the EB waiting line, forcing them to start over the entire immigration process.

Worse, workers on H-1Bs and workers who are applying for their green card need to be sponsored by their employer. This requirement gives their employer the final say over their continued presence in the United States. Companies can, and do, refuse to extend H-1B visas and refuse to sponsor workers for EB visas, effectively blocking their path to U.S. citizenship. This leverage makes it hard for workers to negotiate pay raises, and easy for unscrupulous companies to exploit their workers.

Safeguards Insufficient for U.S. Workers

To receive an EB visa, companies must prove that no American is qualified for the job that the EB worker will be doing. While this requirement is not as effective as it should be, it does afford American workers some measure of protection. The H-1B has no such stipulation and, accordingly, may be used by almost any company to hire foreign workers, regardless of availability of suitable American workers. In effect, the H-1B can be used to replace American workers with foreign workers.

But the problems stemming from a broken immigration system aren't limited to American workers losing their jobs to lower-cost temporary workers — as if that weren't enough. Rather than enduring the lengthy wait and, in some cases, exploitation, many H-1B workers choose to leave the country before they ever receive an EB visa. The H-1B program makes it easy to replace these workers with new temporary workers, so it's no skin off the teeth of the companies that sponsor them, but their emigration equates to a loss of skills in the U.S. economy. And America’s overseas competition benefits from this exodus, as talented H-1B workers who leave the United States reappear in other countries to compete against American companies.

SIA and IEEE-USA's joint letter expressed support for legislation that will strengthen the U.S. high-tech work force by:

• Raising the employment-based immigrant visa cap, including an exemption for foreign professionals with advanced degrees in STEM fields from U.S. universities
   

• Creating a new foreign student visa category to allow U.S. STEM bachelor’s or higher-degree holders who have a job offer to transition directly from student visas to green cards
   

• Extending post-curricular optional practical training for foreign students from 12 months to 24 months, to allow them to transition more easily from temporary to permanent resident status
   

• Exempting the spouses and children of certain employment-based professionals from the employment-based immigrant visa cap

The aforementioned points do not represent an exhaustive list of the policies IEEE-USA would like to see implemented. For example, IEEE-USA remains committed to reforming the H-1B program itself. The letter simply identifies common ground where both IEEE-USA and the SIA agree.

For the past several years, the debate over high-skill immigration has been at a stalemate. IEEE-USA and its Congressional allies have been able to block increases in the H-1B cap, but we have also been unable to enact any reforms to the program, leaving in place a system which is widely recognized to be harmful to U.S. engineers and the country.

The SIA/IEEE-USA joint letter is an attempt to break the stalemate. By focusing on enhancements to the EB program, which both IEEE-USA and SIA agree is an improvement over the H-1B program, IEEE-USA hopes to shift Congress’ focus away from the H-1B and other temporary visa programs towards permanent immigration.

When most Members of Congress think about high-skill immigration, the H-1B is the only program they're familiar with, which explains, in part, why some Members are amenable to calls to expand the program. The joint letter points Congress toward a more mutually agreeable — and less harmful — solution to the problem.

A copy of the joint IEEE-USA/SIA letter can be found here [www.ieeeusa.org/policy/policy/2007/101107.pdf]

Russell T. Harrison is IEEE-USA's Legislative Representative for Grassroots Activities. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.