Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [22]
Of course, U.S. colleges and universities educate many of these immigrants who later become entrepreneurs. Which makes it all the more bizarre that restrictionists want to prevent them from coming here in the first place or, barring that, send them back home soon after graduation to work for, or perhaps one day become, a U.S. competitor.
According to the National Science Foundation, students on temporary visas earned just under one-third of all science and engineering doctorates awarded in the United States in 2003, 55 percent of engineering doctorates, and 43 percent of doctorates in math and computer science. The children of these immigrants, who regularly dominate student math and science competitions, are also an important source of human capital for the United States. In 2004, children of immigrants were 65 percent of the Math Olympiad’s top scorers and 46 percent of the U.S. Physics team. That same year, 60 percent of the finalists and seven of the top ten award winners in the Intel Science Talent Search were immigrants or their children. If we had listened to the anti-immigration crowd over the past twenty years, said Stuart Anderson in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, “we would have wiped out two-thirds of the top future scientists and mathematicians in the United States because we would have barred their parents from ever entering America.”
You’d think that U.S. policy would welcome these talented risk takers—who lately have hailed from places as far-flung as Turkey, Israel, Romania, China, Vietnam, India, and Russia—with open arms. We do, to a certain extent, as evidenced by the fact that the United States remains the predominant destination for foreign students. But our lead has been shrinking in recent years as countries like Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have come to realize the importance of human capital in a global economy and started to compete for it more aggressively.
Indifferent to the trend, Congress chooses to make political hay each year over the number of H-1b visas for skilled professionals that will be issued. The current official cap is sixty-five thousand, an absurdly low number that in recent years has often been reached well before the start of the fiscal year. Opponents of raising the quota or, even better, scrapping it, argue that Silicon Valley is using the visas to hire foreign nationals at lower salaries. But U.S. law requires companies to pay these visa holders prevailing wages and benefits and prohibits hiring them to replace striking Americans. What’s more, the government fees and related red tape associated with hiring a foreign professional add thousands of dollars to the process, thus making them more expensive than natives to employ. And since H-1b visas are temporary, additional fees accrue if and when they need to be renewed.
Rather than having Congress pick a number out of thin air (or the latest polls), a better policy route would be to let the market decide how much high-skill foreign labor the economy can accommodate. Indeed, the market already performs this task, when lawmakers get out of the way and let it. Since the H-1b quota was first enacted in 1992, there have been several years when the economy was soft—1992, 2001- 2003—and the quota hasn’t come close to being met. Lou Dobbs and John Kerry would have you believe that Benedict Arnold CEOs in search of cheap labor are determining the size of our foreign workforce. In fact, it’s the law of supply and demand that’s making the determination. When U.S. companies can find native workers to fill job openings, they prefer to hire them.
STAYING COMPETITIVE
If our policy makers want to reduce dependence on foreign professionals without putting U.S. companies