Only dummies ignore benefits of foreign brainpower

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. With no natural allies, the potential entrepreneurs and inventors who might boost our economy are left out in the cold. Security agencies treat them like criminals. And heedless bureaucracies, seemingly running on autopilot, randomly come up with new ways to keep them out of the country.
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.

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