Creative Class

OK, so I’m a couple of weeks late. But over at TCS Daily, Ilya Shapiro, a Canadian working as a lawyer and writer in Washington D.C., provides a personal perspective on America’s bad joke of an immigration policy.

“Because April 1 was a Sunday, the day exposing the
foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy fell on April 2 this year.
This is the day when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions
with the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas. …The problem is that there aren’t enough of these visas: Congress limits the number of H-1Bs that can be granted each year, and that magic number
has been set at 65,000 for four years now. Before that, and in response
to the technology boom of the late ’90s, Congress temporarily raised
the H-1B cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the
cap has been reached earlier and earlier each year since. In 2005, that meant August. Last year, it was May 26. This year, the cap was reached on… April 2 — the very first day you could file.
Yes, by that Monday afternoon, USCIS had received over 150,000 H-1B
applications. Officials quickly announced that it would randomly select
65,000 petitions from all those it had received April 2 and April 3.”

Ugh……

As for the vast majority of employers and employees who were out of luck,
the immigration laws said, like so many Cubs fans on what was also
baseball’s opening day, “wait till next year.”

Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold
until October 1, 2008—the day that people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal
year 2009 can start work.

Now, why do I care about this issue so much? Because I myself am a foreign
professional. No, not an engineer or scientist—haven’t taken math since
high school. I’m actually a lawyer, and I do quite a bit of political
law right here in Washington, DC.

What helps me is that I come from Canada—my parents took a wrong turn at the
St. Lawrence when we immigrated from the Soviet Union—which gets a
special provision of un-capped visas under NAFTA. Still, these NAFTA
visas are only good for one year at a time, and I have to maintain the
legal fiction that after getting my education in the US and living my
entire adult life here, I have no intention of staying permanently.

But at least I get to be here, tenuous as my grasp on the American dream
may be. As the H-1B petition statistics demonstrate, there are hundreds
of thousands of qualified people with job offers in America who
cannot realize their dreams in their home countries. These are people
who, like my engineer parents, want a better life for their children
and see the United States as a bastion of freedom and rule of law in an
unruly time. They aim to leave places that, while not always oppressing
them, have sclerotic economic systems less conducive to
entrepreneurship and growth than America (India, France, most of the
world).

Yet neither the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act the Senate passed last year nor the STRIVE Act, a bill now pending before the House that combines increased border
security with a guest-worker program, contemplates the doctors,
scientists, and software developers (forget lawyers and pundits!) the
country needs. And, as I said before, even those in that category who
make it here have to leave just as they’ve planted roots and become
increasingly assimilated.

Thus America continues to maintain an incomprehensible and
counter-productive immigration policy, damaging both pocketbooks and
heartstrings from Silicon Valley to the Bay of Bengal. And unless
Congress and the White House do something to fundamentally reshape
immigration rules with respect to skilled workers (let alone the
hard-working gardeners and construction workers who get all the news
coverage) things will only get worse.

I just hope I get married—absurdly, the only route to permanent residence
open to people like me—before I have to leave the country.

If only this were all a bad April Fools’ joke.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.