WorldCity Business Magazine

(6) Opinion: America's Competitive Disadvantage

by Deidre Nero Valladares, Esq.

South Florida, Miami-Dade County in particular, prides itself on its global culture, its diversity and the fact that we are a top destination for international businesses. We market our community to the world as the Gateway to the Americas and tout our international flavor as one of our biggest assets. Yet Miami, and other global-minded cities across the country, face counterproductive immigration policies that are harming our ability to compete in the world marketplace.

In our community, and other cities like New York and Los Angeles, the most keenly felt of these disadvantageous policies is the congressionally mandated cap on the H1B visa, the most commonly used visa to bring top-level professional workers to the U.S. The cap places a limit on new visas at 85,000 H1B visas per fiscal year, which runs from October 1 to September 30.

Sixty-five thousand of those visas are for workers with at least a Bachelors degree and a job offer from a U.S. company in a specialty occupation. The other 20,000 are reserved for workers with at least a Masters degree from a U.S. university and a job offer from a U.S. company in a specialty occupation. While 85,000 visas may sound like a lot, it is actually nowhere near meeting the considerable demand from U.S. companies. Every year, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services allows companies to start applying on April 1 for the visas for the upcoming fiscal year. Last year, USCIS received about 150,000 H1B petitions on the first day it began accepting petitions. This forced it to conduct a random lottery for the available slots with all the petitions that were received on the first two days of the filing season. Unlucky petitioners who did not receive a slot in the lottery got their application packages returned to them.

Anticipating a similar rush on H1Bs this year, SCIS decided to change its procedures for conducting the lottery. It announced that it would accept H1B petitions for five business days (April 1-April 7) and place all those petitions into the lottery pool. The first selection would be for the 20,000 U.S. Masters cap, and any of those petitions not receiving a spot would be placed into the regular 65,000 pool. What this means is a few more days to get your petitions submitted, but a much smaller chance to actually get an available visa slot, i.e. win the lottery.

The impact of the H1B visa policy is a clear competitive disadvantage for U.S. companies in the global marketplace. The inability to recruit and hire talent from around the world due to lack of available visas creates a gap in our market. And we often send the best and brightest to other countries. The United Kingdom, for example, has a much more open visa policy, especially when it comes to highly educated and skilled workers. Many of the people leaving our country were educated in the U.S. university system. Unable to join our workforce due to the lack of H1B visas, they seek work abroad. And yet it is these very individuals we should be seeking to retain here to become contributors to our economy. Instead, our restrictive visa policies force these professionals to work elsewhere, to the detriment of our economy and competitiveness on a global level.

Despite the importance of this issue, we hear little discussion coming out of Washington, D.C. about immigration except for occasional debate regarding building fences, illegal immigrants, drivers licenses, speaking English, and the like. The conversation in Congress and in the media revolves entirely around the supposed harm that illegal and unskilled immigrants do to our country. Meanwhile, lost in the shuffle is the all-important question of reform to professional worker visa policies.

What Congress should be addressing is the damage that the cap on H1B visas is doing to our nations competitiveness, economy, and our ability to support innovation. Congress should be discussing the changes desperately needed in our outdated policies that force U.S. companies to face a year-long black-out period during which they cannot hire international talent.

Congressional inaction has resulted in the cap remaining at the current low and vastly inadequate level. It doesnt need to be that way. The cap is a number the Congress artificially created, and they can easily raise it or eliminate it altogether. Research scientists, engineers, computer and system analysts, accountants, doctors, professors, business executives these are just a few of the types of professionals that seek H1B visas to work in the U.S. Are these the types of workers we want to be turning away? No. Yet we are, and on a large scale each year. When this country was a young nation centered on agriculture and basic industry, we opened our doors to workers from other countries to help fill those labor needs. Now, our nation thrives on technology, science
and business, yet we close our doors to the professionals that can help our economy grow. Our own most innovative companies (Microsoft, for example) are moving operations to other countries, like Canada, with less restrictive visa policies. If we want to remain globally competitive, we need to push Congress to reform the current system, which places us at a large competitive disadvantage.

Deirdre Nero Valladares is an immigration attorney at the law form of Becker & Poliakoff. She is also chair of the Immigration Taskforce at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, which regularly travels to Washington, D.C. to advocate for changes to visa policies. She can be reached at dnero@becker-poliakoff.com.