Congress Should Help Skilled Foreigners Who Are Legally in America Stay in America

A s countries around the world witness slowing population growth (China just reported negative population growth for the first time on record), many, including America, are also experiencing a shortage of workers, which is, in part, contributing to wage inflation (thus adding to an inflationary spiral kicked off by enormous amounts of government spending).

An easy way to ameliorate the worker shortage, without going down the controversial path of policy related to undocumented immigrants, is to help high-skilled foreign workers who are legally in America — and already approved for green cards — stay in America.

As of 2019, there were an estimated 800,000 Indian nationals living and working in the U.S. on temporary work visas who had already been approved for green cards by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Because of antiquated per-country quotas, Indian nationals have their own, separate green-card queue which now suffers a backlog of more than ten years. Indeed, because temporary work visas are tied to the employers who petitioned for them, many Indian nationals — approved for permanent residence but backlogged — have been stuck at the firms at which they have worked for many years, finding it near-impossible to move to other companies or start their own.

In 2020, the U.S. Senate quietly and unanimously (yes, unanimously) passed an immigration bill, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019, sponsored by Republican senator Mike Lee and then-senator Kamala Harris, which would have resolved the decade-long green-card backlog for Indian nationals. A similar House bill was passed by a wide margin, but Congress’s reconciling the two bills was hampered by minor procedural differences and eventually succumbed to broader immigration politics, with Democrats’ seeking to combine it with other immigration measures rather than proceeding with the narrow bill. The new 118th Congress, which features a narrow Democratic Senate majority and a Republican House majority, has the opportunity to revisit the issue and pass a clean bill.

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act is commonsense bipartisan legislation that can enhance economic growth by boosting innovation and alleviating the worker shortage.

Ending country-of-origin caps (and the resulting discrimination) would enable hardworking legal immigrants to move to other jobs, including entrepreneurial and more-innovative opportunities. (Research by Harvard economist Bill Kerr finds that Indian immigrants already make up a significant share of the United States’ patent grantees.) The act would also allow these immigrants’ children — many of whom have spent over a decade in the U.S. — to remain in the U.S. instead of being forced to return to their country of origin upon turning 21, which might result in their parents’ leaving with them.

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, as originally written, would have reduced the number of green cards for family-based immigrants and increased the number of those available for skills-based immigration, a welcome step in a bipartisan effort of shifting toward a points-based immigration system of the kind that has worked well for the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

There was also something in it for those who want the U.S. to crack down further on the Communist Party of China. The original Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act would have banned any member of the Chinese Communist Party or People’s Liberation Army from adjusting his immigration status and becoming a green-card holder. Further, it would have cracked down on so-called H-1B abuse by requiring that no more than 50 percent of an employer’s workforce consist of temporary-visa holders.

U.S. economic productivity — an important driver of wage gains, particularly for those at and below the median income — has been slowing down in recent decades. Allowing about a million Indian migrants to finally obtain the green cards for which they’ve already been approved could help reverse that trend. Studies by the Kauffman Foundation have shown that immigrants to the U.S. are twice as likely to found businesses than those born in the U.S., and that in recent years immigrants have founded one-quarter of American engineering and technology companies.

Why not allow more high-skilled immigrants to bring their talents to the U.S.? After all, a long list of American entrepreneurs, including Alexander Graham Bell (founder of AT&T), Charles Pfizer (founder of Pfizer), Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel), Nigel Morris (founder of Capital One), Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), and Elon Musk (of Tesla and SpaceX), have done exactly that.

This kind of skills-based immigration does not take away slices of the economic pie from American workers — it offers the prospect of enlarging it.