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Topic: Hurry up and let them in (Read 615 times)
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iamme
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Hurry Up And Let Them In
Angelo A. Paparelli 03.20.08, 6:00 AM ET
Source: Forbes
Shame on Congress. Shame on the Bush administration. With the economy in freefall, our leaders are blind to the simple fix that would quickly create jobs and inject financial vitality into every region of the nation: jobs-based immigration reforms.
There is a postpartisan solution. Improve the laws on legal immigration of foreign workers. Scrap the 1990 temporary worker quotas, which grant a set number of visas to foreign employees; they are numbers chosen out of thin air. Allow U.S. employers with job openings to hire professional and skilled foreign-born workers who are either waiting abroad or about to graduate from America's colleges and universities (ensuring, of course, robust safeguards for labor-law enforcement). Create a clear path to green cards and citizenship for the law-abiding foreign workers who contribute skills and talents that help grow our economy.
Comprehensive reform of illegal immigration must, of course, wait until election-season mania has subsided and a new government is installed. But in the twilight of the present power structure, the diddling, dawdling, fiddling and twiddling must stop. Small-bore immigration solutions, targeted to the pressing needs of the current economy, must be enacted now.
Congress must stop fixating solely on border security and the small numbers of brazen employers who hire workers illegally. Concentrate instead on the jobs that are begging to be filled. As food prices rise, crops are rotting on the vine for lack of harvesters. As Americans with skimpy wallets and a feeble currency forgo summer travel abroad, hoteliers and restaurant owners must scale back hours of operation for lack of hospitality-industry workers.
As S&P 500 companies try to fill 140,000 job openings and U.S.-based technology firms are short an average of 470 workers each, American businesses--large and small--scamper to prepare professional-worker petitions for submission by April 1 to a helmless department of U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. The result? What will likely be a once-yearly H-1B visa lottery for jobs that cannot be filled until Oct. 1. By that point, those spots will have sat empty for six months.
Pity the talented international students graduating with a bachelor's degree this June. In most cases, these graduates must leave the U.S. because they don't yet qualify under the current quota, and jobs under next year's quota don't come online again until October 2009. What's to say they'll come back? Our global competitors are savvy. They vie to recruit "made-in-America" foreign students to replace retiring workers in their aging and increasingly childless societies. New research shows that, contrary to urban legend, the hiring of H-1B visa-holders tends to increase, not decrease, employment of Americans at U.S. technology companies. Why don't we, as a nation, keep the foreign professionals that our own universities mint?
Pity, too, the high school valedictorians and other top achievers, innocent children brought to and kept in this country by law-breaking parents--students whose only infraction is their foreign birth. Raised in America and indistinguishable from our own teens, they face a graffiti-covered brick wall, unable to attend or pay for college and unable to work legally. Their choices are the underground economy or gang membership.
Why must this folly continue? No reason--except for a pusillanimous Congress, cowed by cable TV pundits and bloviating bloggers who fuel the flames of xenophobia, all of whom have apparently forgotten the public's emphatic rejection of every anti-immigration candidate running for election this primary season.
While Congress hones in on steroids in baseball, President Bush insists on amnesty for telecom companies for their complicity in the allegedly illegal wiretapping of American citizens and the media breathlessly trace the philandering of a disgraced former governor and a big city mayor, our economy continues to shrink. Though it's not a silver bullet, jobs-focused reform of the legal immigration system will contribute tangibly to the mending of our failing economy. Congress must take action now.
Angelo A. Paparelli, who practices immigration law in New York City and Irvine, Calif., is the president of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers.
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« Last Edit: March 20, 2008, 05:49:54 AM by iamme »
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tony_cheek
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Great article!
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tony_cheek
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cool - and make sure you emphasize that last bit.
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mongo
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More wishful thinking.
There is already a work-based visa program for skilled professionals, the H1-B visa, by which you are basically th slave of your recruiting company for up to 8 years (6, mandatory, and 2 more if they agree, at their complete discretion, to "sponsor" you for a green card).
These "recruiting companies", ranking in the realms of nature right below used car salesmen, do not employ the H1B's directly, but place them with the real employer in exchange for a cut in their hourly wages.
In other words: there is a true legion of parasitic companies that profit from a semi-slavery system (I think the technical word is "indentured work"). The system is unfair for American employers (who end up paying good money for people with questionanable skills), does not benefit American workers (who are cheated from available openings in skilled occupations), and it abusive to the "beneficiaries" themselves.
The H1B mills want, of course, the ridiculously low annual quota of H1B's to be raised (the available spots are taken up minutes after the DHS opens its office for business the single day of the year applications are accepted). Normally, Congress jerks around with the technology lobby and raises the cap "just this once", lest they anger the xenophobes.
So, everybody goes home with the satisfaction of a job well done :
-Congress, "defending" the American worker.
-The xenos, who did due diligence exerting pressure so that "we are not flooded with Indian engineers"
-The H1B recruiting mills, who have a new load of fresh meat for the year
-The companies in need of skilled workers, who decreased the bargaining power of skilled American workers.
I believe there is, objectively, a shortage of skilled professionals in the USA. However, the "solution" created to address the problem (the H1B program) is immoral.
As anyone is profiting from it, except workers (both foreign and American), I predict a long life for it.
Bill Gates et alia are not about to grab a sign and march for comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon.
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