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Visa quota reflects decline in U.S. education
Oakland Tribune, Apr 11, 2007
MANY Bay Area high-tech and science-based businesses requiring well-educated, highly skilled workers spent a great deal of time recently scrambling to prepare H-1B visa applications to bring foreign workers into our country.
It's part of an annual, post-9/11 scrum necessitated by a drop in the cap for such visas, from 195,000 to 65,000, and the lack of enough trained native-born Americans to fill the jobs. Now such firms want to either raise the quota or erase the visa cap.
The problem, they say, is our nation doesn't produce enough native or naturalized accountants, architects, computer programmers, engineers and technical specialists to fill all the openings in these knowledge-based firms.
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World competition for science, math and technological workers -- many of them trained at U.S. universities -- also has increased significantly with the development of high-tech firms overseas. India, which sends many students to the U.S. for training, is a good example.
Such Bay Area biotechnology companies as Genentech, Bayer and Gilead Sciences can't find enough scientists to hire. Meanwhile, American students show diminished interest in preparing themselves for such positions -- one-third of the graduate students at Stanford and 20 percent of those at UC Berkeley come from overseas.
The 65,000 visas allotted for skilled workers disappear overnight when eligibility opens. Some firms say 70 percent of the qualified applicants for the positions are from overseas.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called for the arbitrary visa cap to be eliminated. Congress has introduced legislation that would raise it to 180,000 per year. Critics object, saying firms use the visas to bring in workers from overseas who they pay sub-average wages.
Firms such as Oracle and a coalition of corporations called Compete America, however, have a better idea. They're trying to both increase visas and train more Americans to fill the openings. Both need to be done.
What's ultimately at risk is America's continued leadership, dominance or in some cases the survival of information businesses. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley, says our education system fails students at all levels: "We do a lousy job of training our kids to be scientists."
Our approach should be twofold: We must admit enough skilled foreign workers to fill the void while encouraging American students to pursue science and mathematics, and develop the technical skills needed to succeed in a more competitive, global economy.
Instead of dropping the H-1B cap entirely, temporarily increase the numbers. But more important, we should learn a lesson from competing nations by putting more resources into developing the type of workers the world needs. China, India and other nations do so at our expense.
The problem finding workers stems from a lack of student interest as well as a lack of emphasis and training in science, mathematics, etc., in our public schools and universities.
California and the United States need to get serious about rejuvenating education to the point where we provide young people with the incentives, skills and backgrounds they need to compete in tomorrow's economy. If we don't, the superiority we've enjoyed in many technical and scientific fields since World War II will continue to erode.
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