WorldCity Business Magazine

Immigration ineptitude

by Jerry Haar

Business-visa applicants used to wait hours for interviews with U.S. consular officials. From now on, they’ll wait years.

Forget trying to single out who deserves the top award for incompetency in the New Orleans-Hurricane Katrina relief scandal. Someone unrelated to that disaster deserves it even more: the federal official who mandated a limit on business-sponsored visas.

In an October bulletin, the U.S. State Department announced rules that make it nearly impossible to secure work visas for immigrants unless they filed applications before specified dates in the past. The deadlines mean that some engineers, technicians or other business-sponsored visa applicants with applications on file still have a chance of getting working papers. But those who apply now will wait four, six or even more years.

Some 620,000 immigrant visas are issued annually. Only 140,000 are for business-sponsored immigrants.

The visa restrictions are aimed primarily at workers from China, India and the Philippines. But they will hurt business immigrants in general, joining the restrictive and hassle-laden rules that currently limit foreign-student visas.

A steady flow of technical talent is needed to spawn innovation and entrepreneurship, not only in California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 but also in South Florida and elsewhere in the United States. However, in this era of intensified global competition, we cannot supply that talent domestically. According to the National Science Foundation, the United States produces only 60,000 engineers per year, compared to China’s 220,000

If corporations cannot bring technical specialists to the United States, they are likely to send their technical jobs offshore. This puts the Bush administration in the position of encouraging the offshoring of jobs. I am a firm supporter of outsourcing and offshoring, but those decisions should be based on microeconomic factors, rather than the whim of government bureaucrats.

Besides, we need more, not fewer, educated immigrants. They work hard, save, invest and enshrine family and religious values. Their kids are role models, who spend an inordinate amount of time tackling tough academic subjects, reading, learning the art of debate while American kids rot their synapses, zoned out on video games, garbage TV and drugs.

The government’s visa policy also undermines business starts. Many sponsored immigrants eventually leave their host companies to launch their own businesses. They fuel the U.S. entrepreneurial spirit and inspire invention. It’s the kind of stuff embodied in people like Intel founder Andrew Grove, born in Hungary; India’s Narpat Bhandari, who founded Aspen Semiconductor; Russian immigrant Sergey Brin who helped start Google; and Iranian Nikki Olyaim, who created Detroit IT consulting firm Innovision Technologies.