Immigration Reform - the Case of H-1B

INTRODUCTIONIn June 2012, in the case of Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court struck down Arizona legislation that was, in part, intended to make an undocumented worker seeking employment a criminal subject to criminal punishments. The Court referenced that Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 does not impose criminal penalties on people seeking employment, and that Congress had decided it was inappropriate to impose criminal penalties on aliens who engage in undocumented employment. The Court went on to re-assert the role of the Federal Government as the primary source of authority for immigration policy. Though this may not have been the intent of the Court, but considering the heightened attention to immigration policy in the United States, the Court's ruling ignited vigorous debate about the need to formulate serious and comprehensive reform. After all, immigration has always been an integral feature of life in America. There currently are 42 million immigrants living in the US representing one in seven residents and one in six workers. And while immigrants account for 13 percent of US population, they represent 26 percent of America's Nobel Prize recipients and 24 percent of patent applicants (Wadhwa et al., 2007). Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies in the US were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. This has always been the case from P&G in 1837, Pfizer in 1849, US Steel in 1901, all the way to Intel, Brighstar, Ebay, and Google today - all started by immigrants. Immigrants have been a remarkable and admirable corner stone in the history and life of America.While much of the passionate recent debate centered on the perplexing question of what to do with the millions of undocumented aliens currently in the US, there is some effort to go beyond this issue to deal with serious economic challenges. One such challenge may be a pending shortage of labor due in part to continued decline in US labor force, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and shown in Figure 1. Another related critical issue that impacts the supply of skilled labor is the steady rise in the median age of the US workforce and the expectation that it will continue to rise as s hown in Table 1. These labor trends emphasize the need for immigration reform in order for the US economy not to fall behind in the global search for talent especially that other countries pursue aggressive and competitive strategies to attract the tale nted workforce of the world. Countries like Australia, Switzerland, Canada, UK and others are dedicating more of their total permanent residency visas to employment-based visas when the US is reducing such visas, as will be shown in a later part of this paper. If these trends were to continue, it may be inevitable that the US economy will experience sharp shortages of skilled workforce. Now with regard to reform, US immigration laws have historically seen major reform every three to four decades. Considering that the last attempt at comprehensive reform happened over thirty years ago, the present should be the time for reform, and as will be presented later, the US Senate has begun formulating new legislation.THE CASE OF H-1B VISAA critical component of US immigration law is a visa known as H-1B, whereby a US company sponsors a foreign national for purposes of employment in a skilled occupation for a number of years. Companies rely on this program to recruit skilled workers they cannot find in local labor markets. Advanced technology businesses rely on the visa to recruit international talent for STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), an area where the United States is projected to have serious shortage because STEM jobs are growing three times faster than other jobs, but students are not entering STEM programs of study in sufficient numbers. According to the National Science Foundation, the percentage of undergraduates studying engineering in Singapore is 33. …

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