U.S. Economy Needs Skilled Overseas Employees

The recent debate over immigration policy commonly depicts immigrants as undocumented, uneducated people who flood our borders with out inspection.

Though many immigrants who enter this nation are unskilled laborers who present important services in many sectors of our financial system, of equal significance to the immigration debate are the highly educated overseas professionals whose expertise play a significant role in the enrichment of our economy.

The U.S. financial system has shifted considerably over the past 50 years. We’re now not the blue collar nation that we as soon as were. The transformation from a producing to a data-based economy has created a rising demand for expert technical workers. This demand has been accompanied by a decline within the number of native-born students searching for degrees within the fields of science, engineering and technology.

Our prestigious graduate institutions presently train extra overseas nationals than U.S. citizens in these fields. To alleviate labor shortages, U.S. businesses should be capable to recruit and hire additional international-born professionals.

We should retain the educated professionals whom we’ve skilled internally with a view to benefit from the unique expertise that they possess. By sending the best and the brightest staff again to their respective nations, we solely create competition for ourselves, thereby diminishing America’s economic clout.

As a way to enhance the number of extremely skilled professionals in this nation, it’s necessary to reform the employment-based mostly immigration system and provide a ample quantity of avenues through which U.S. companies can legally employ specialised workers. We must increase the number of specialized worker visas awarded.

H-1B visas, or temporary expert worker visas, are at the moment capped at only sixty five,000 annually. But, this “cap” is reached in a couple of months, and U.S. companies are barred from hiring international-born professionals for the remainder of the fiscal year.

At the same time, we should increase recruitment and coaching of U.S. students. H-1B visas accelerate this process; a hefty portion of the processing charges for the H-1B visas are directed to the education and training of U.S. college students in science and technology.

It will be important that skilled staff usually are not ignored in the present debate relating to comprehensive immigration reform. Raising the H-1B visa cap is vital to sustaining our leadership on the planet market. By retaining foreign nationals, we might make sure that U.S. businesses have probably the most highly qualified employees in their fields, helping America maintain its edge in an more and more competitive global economy.

Deborah Notkin is president of the American Immigration Attorneys Association. – NU

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