Not Enough Visas

This June, there’s one important piece of paper that many of the international students of Harvard’s Class of 2007 will not be graduating with: an H-1B visa. As Harvard’s graduates prepare to enter the workforce, for the 10 percent that come from oversees, a diploma will not be enough; they need an H-1B visa to grant them permission to stay and use their degree to perform high-skill jobs in the United States. While their peers look forward to their month of freedom before heading to Wall Street, international students anxiously wait to see if they’ll even be allowed to stay and work at all in the country where they’ve lived and worked for the past four years.

Congressionally-mandated restrictions force many of the nation’s most qualified workers out of the U.S. market before they even enter it. By allowing these restrictions to continue, the U.S. is not only harming these newly-minted graduates, but is robbing the U.S. skilled labor market of many of its most willing and able young professionals. With elections on the horizon, we hope that a lame duck Congress will act on legislation that will expand on the U.S.’s H1-B visa program.

The number of individuals granted H-1B status is capped at 65,000 annually. Acquiring an H-1B visa requires proof of graduation from college and a sponsoring U.S. employer, and allows the individual to work in the United States for up to six years. Thousands of international students in the U.S. are turned down every year, as Congress effectively shuts the door on many of the world’s brightest young minds, eager to contribute to the U.S. economy by living and working high-skill jobs in the nation in which they were educated.

Graduation dates at many colleges in the U.S. make attaining an H-1B especially difficult, because by the time students can provide proof of graduation, the quota is likely to be filled. This was the issue facing Harvard students last year, as the quota for H-1Bs was filled on May 26 (about two weeks before graduation), leaving many international Harvard students intending to work in the U.S. up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

One glimmer of hope for these students is the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows international students to work in the U.S. for up to twelve months without a visa. However, OPT is not the lifesaver it appears to be: Not only can foreigners only seek jobs related to their field of study, but the months students have spent working during their college summers are subtracted from the months allotted to them by OPT. A student from abroad who has chosen to work all three summers for three months each comes into the OPT program after graduation with only three more months left in their allowance.

Further, since H-1B visas take effect at the beginning of October, students working in the U.S. with the yearlong OPT extension are left with a four-month void during which they cannot work. A class of 2007 graduate could work through OPT until June 2008 and apply for an H-1B in the spring, but would be left without a legal means to be employed from June 2008 until October.

Recent college graduates are not the only people adversely affected by the current H-1B policy, although their ordeals are the most immediate. The U.S. economy as a whole is also stunted by the cap. With current labor shortages in Silicon Valley and the southern California aerospace industry, and a low unemployment rate of 4.6 percent in September 2006, the U.S. is hardly overflowing with high-skill people out of work. Since the number of foreigners allowed to perform specialty occupations is not capped out of reasonable concern for national welfare, it is a protectionist measure that ends up telling many of our country’s hardest working specialists: “Go home.”

The U.S. economy is strong largely because of its ability to attract and retain highly skilled scientists and engineers from abroad. The use of H-1B visas is the main vehicle U.S. employers have to bring in foreign workers from abroad, and the limited influx of high-skilled foreign labor hurts the economy and undermines the U.S. focus on technology.

The SKIL (Securing Knowledge, Innovation, and Leadership) Bill, introduced by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), is aimed at promoting economic competitiveness and growth by increasing the number of H-1Bs granted annually from 65,000 to 115,000 and doubling the length of OPT eligibility. However, this bill has been held up in Congress since June because it is coupled with the stalled comprehensive immigration reform bill. Congress ought to immediately decouple this bill in order to pass it, benefiting the U.S. and skilled workers from abroad. This is an issue of bipartisan agreement, unfortunately wedded to a messy partisan nightmare.

Beyond the inconveniences posed to individual college students, the implications of allowing the SKIL Bill to remain uncoupled and ergo, un-passed, are much more far-reaching. The U.S. should not be a factory for churning out skilled workers and then shipping them back overseas. Instead, we should be a nation that cultivates knowledge and the paradigm of efficient use of intellectual resources. We should culture and house the world’s bright young minds, not merely process them. To maintain a policy that ignores the United States’ history of intellectual pursuit and covets jobs for its citizens is regressive, and will ultimately prove detrimental to those it sets out to protect.