It’s difficult to believe passionately in an issue that almost nobody cares about, and when those that do care usually disagree with you. But life is hard, so here I am: a passionate believer in letting more high-skilled workers immigrate to the United States.
There’s really no natural constituency for high-skilled immigration. The potential immigrants themselves aren’t in the country yet. High-skilled Americans are afraid that high-skilled immigrants will take their jobs and depress their wages (though the evidence says this isn’t really true). And of course the low-skilled Americans don’t even have the issue on their radar.
The closest thing to a constituency for high-skilled immigration is Silicon Valley, because tech companies naturally want plentiful, cheap high-skilled employees. And Silicon Valley has done an admirable job of lobbying over time for increasing the number of H-1B visas. The problem is that H-1B holders aren’t actually immigrants – they’re guest workers.
H-1B holders are at a large disadvantage with respect to permanent residents with green cards or citizens when it comes to job mobility and negotiating leverage with their employers. The H-1B program isn’t indentured servitude, but it isn’t immigration either.
What about the political parties? Some people have suggested that the Democratic Party is holding high-skilled immigration policy hostage, demanding a deal on illegal immigration as part of the package. Vox recently suggested the exact opposite – that Republicans might be willing to cut a deal on high-skilled immigration, but only in exchange for a crackdown on undocumented workers. Either way, don’t expect much progress here.
The U.S. needs high-skilled immigrants. They start lots of companies, which give people jobs. They power most of our highest-value-added industries.
The main arguments against high-skilled immigration are wrong. Brain drain is less important than brain gain.
In an ideal world, what would we be doing to increase high-skilled immigration? By far the most important thing is to increase the number of green cards – not H-1Bs – and to base the new crop of green cards on skills instead of family reunification. The idea of stapling a green card to the diplomas of foreigners who study in the U.S. is a good one. Beyond that, we should increase the number of entrepreneurship visas, boost the number of H-1Bs, and reform the H-1B visa to make workers less tethered to specific employers. But green cards are really the key.
By keeping out high-skilled immigrants, the U.S. government is like a basketball player shooting at the wrong basket and scoring against his own team. We need to stop doing that, and we need to stop now. •
Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. Distributed by Bloomberg View.