Call to increase H-1B visas by Business Roundtable.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: With the announcement that both the 65,000 and 20,000 H-1B visa caps for fiscal year 2016 were reached within seven days of opening applications, a top business lobbying group has made renewed calls for Congress to fix the immigration system that keeps U.S. companies from hiring the world’s top talent.
“Congress cannot claim it’s too hard to allow top world talent to contribute to America when other countries have figured out how to do it for their own economies,” said Business Roundtable (BRT), an association of CEOs from leading U.S. companies that works to promote public policy and the American economy.
“How many more H-1B caps do we have to reach before policymakers fix the system,” asked Greg Brown, who serves as chairman and CEO of Motorola Solutions as well as chair of the BRT Immigration Committee.
The latest round of H-1B applications marks the second year in a row the cap was reached within seven days; the year before that it only took five.
The difficulty in obtaining an H-1B visa may only be increasing, but a recent study released by the Brookings Institute revealed major metropolitan areas such as Dallas, Detroit, and Durham-Chapel Hill all have large H-1B holding populations who are crucial to the local economies.
Yuan Yuan is a 2014 College graduate from China who now works full-time at the accounting firm Ernest & Young in Philadelphia. She told the Daily Pennsylvanian that usually only big companies are willing to sponsor H-1B visa applications because the cost amounts to thousands of dollars per international employee.
“I once was interviewing for a not-so-big firm, and I passed the first round. Yet when the [human resources] person asked me if I was an international student and I said yes, the recruiter immediately said I wasn’t eligible for the position anymore because the company doesn’t sponsor the H-1B visa application,” said Yuan.
Even Instagram — one of the most visible modern American success stories — may have fallen victim to H-1B complications if Mike Krieger had left the country before helping found the company that was acquired by Facebook two years after its inception for $1 billion.
According to Bloomberg, it was very nearly a reality — Krieger seriously considered telling [Instagram co-founder Kevin] Systrom to find his replacement in 2010 because he couldn’t get his H-1B visa transferred from his previous employer, Meebo.
“It was approaching the point of hard conversations,” Krieger told Bloomberg. “I had moments where I was like, ‘Maybe I should just tell Kevin to forget about it and find somebody who is easier to hire.’”
The outdated H-1B system played a significant role in the BRT revelation that it places the U.S. ninth out of 10 advanced economies in terms of employment-based immigration policies.
In a report titled, “State of Immigration: How the United States Stacks Up in the Global Talent Competition,” the BRT surmises that U.S. employment-based immigration policies are “mostly unfavorable” to economic growth, while most economically competitive nations have adopted better policies across the board.