Increased Skilled Immigration America's Best Option to Solve Economic Crisis?
Our friend Lexington, over at Economist.com, calls the Obama administration and the Democratically-controlled Congress "dumb" for restricting companies' ability to hire H-1B visa workers. Citing a Kauffman Foundation study, Lexington's reasoning is persuasive:
Chinese and Indian immigrants founded more than half of all high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. Immigrants co-founded Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo. Immigrants contributed to more than a quarter of US global patent applications. Immigrant companies employed 450,000 workers in 2006 and generated $52 billion in revenue.
Indeed. I'm hard-pressed to see how it helps our struggling economy to actively discourage highly-talented and entrepreneurial immigrants from coming to our country and setting up lucrative, high-tech job creating, tax revenue generating businesses. Furthermore, as Lexington points out, it's not just the short-sighted and protectionist immigration instincts that will ultimately stymie our economy. We're also losing highly-skilled immigrants to our global competition:
Americans have always assumed that skilled immigrants would do anything to get a bite at the American dream. But other countries [namely China and India] are producing high-tech clusters that offer bright people plenty of opportunities. They are also putting out welcome mats for the talented rather than building bureaucratic obstacle courses.
Our country's immigration policies say a lot about us. Sadly, our immigration laws are currently saying that we don't understand what it takes to stay ahead of the global competition. I truly don't believe that Obama is a protectionist at heart, but right now our immigration policies are communicating exactly the wrong message at a very dangerous time for our economy and country as a whole.
