The Immigration of Innovation
While election year debate in the United States focuses on undocumented immigrants, researchers and business leaders see the real problem elsewhere: immigration policies that limit companies' ability to recruit and retain high skilled workers across national borders. Immigration provides desperately needed access to the global brain pool. Employers say the United States simply doesn't produce enough qualified native born individuals to fill all the high skilled job openings, so they must look to other countries, and to immigrants trained here, to find talent. US immigration policy, critics say, hamstrings companies' ability to compete for talent and, consequently, US competitiveness. The difficulties are most evident in the annual lottery for H 1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor high skilled workers to fill specific openings. For fiscal year 2017, the cap, set by Congress, was 85,000. Some 236,000 petitions were filed within a week of the lottery's opening in April the highest number in four years. That means nearly two out of every three applications were denied, meaning companies lost potentially valuable employees, said Rebecca Peters, director of government affairs for the Council for Global Immigration (CFGI) "That means terminating employees who didn't get picked, or transferring operations overseas. That jeopardizes research and causes projects to leave the US." She pointed to the 2014 move by Microsoft to open a new training and development center in Vancouver, British Columbia, creating 400 new jobs, in part to take advantage of Canada's more flexible immigration policies. And the system is expensive for employers. A CFGI report found that the average employer sponsor of H 1B workers spends $140,192 on government immigration fees and $210,303 on immigration related legal fees. Some changes in this year's lottery made it even more expensive: fees some employers pay to submit visa applications doubled; employers that have 50 or more employees in the United States and 50 percent or more of those employees on H 1B visas pay an additional $4,000 on top of existing fees. Current fees for each H 1B petition include the base filing fee of $325, plus additional fees, depending on the size of the sponsoring company and type of applications, of $750 or $1,500 plus $500 for fraud prevention and $1,225 for expedited processing. Given these numbers, it should be unsurprising that employers are not happy with the system. The CFGI survey found that only 19 percent of employers who sponsor employees for H 1B visas think current limits meet workforce needs; by contrast, employers in other countries report much higher satisfaction with their government immigration policies. A 2015 Business Roundtable study comparing the immigration policies of the 10 most advanced economies in the world ranked the United States ninth, ahead of Japan, in policies that help employers hire and retain high skilled workers. Germany ranked at the top. There are exemptions and alternatives to the H 1B visa caps. For example, institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations associated with government agencies and universities are not subject to H 1B caps; TN visas, instituted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, allow certain Mexican and Canadian professionals to enter the United States outside of the H 1B system. There are also specific visas for workers from particular countries and L l visas for intracompany transferees in companies with foreign operations. 0 1 visas apply to those with "extraordinary ability" that is, unique skills or qualifications in science, engineering or the arts. While the alternatives to H 1B visa status are not all subject to caps, they often impose stringent, complex requirements and many also require employer sponsorship. Critics of the current visa system say US employers will lose what a 2015 article in the Journal of World Business called the "worldwide war for talent" if it's not fixed soon and more comprehensive measures aren't taken to make the US more open to foreign innovators.