Highly Skilled Immigration to US

This page is about open discussion of high skilled immigration to the US. This page is open to more discussion.

The US has one of the largest skilled immigration programs in the world. However it has been argued that the level of skilled immigration per US citizen is far lower than what would be available in other countries such as Australia or Great Britain and hence this has caused substantial delays to immigration for citizens of certain countries. US companies have been using these foreign nationals to fill positions in areas of labor shortage such as IT, Electrical and Computer Engineering and sometimes to serve as Medical Professionals in shortage areas such as high poverty areas.

When looked closely at the level of skilled immigration, this argument is rather wrong. The level of admission to the US based skilled immigration has remained the same as compared to other countries while the backlogs have increased only in the US substantially. An alternate reason could be the following. The onset of technology during the 1990's which has continued till date, has increased the labor productivity of the economy and expanded the economy to far greater heights leading to more job creation in critical areas such as IT and Engineering. To fill these shortage areas, skilled temporary visas had increased while the number of permanent visas remained the same. This has led to far too many applications for the 140,000 skilled permanent visas. However even this does not explain only a handful of countries experience backlog.

In some cases even this 140,000 number is misleading as any one country can hold no more than 7% of the total visas in any year and 1/3rd of the 140,000 is usually given to professors in tenure track. So that leaves around 93,000 permanent visas for skilled migrants and 7% of this which is around 6500 for any given country.

This 7% quota is the leading cause of shortages and backlogs currently seen in the system. The burden on the processing times can be cut short phenomenally by removing this cap and keeping the absolute numbers (140,000) the same. Critics such as Immigration Voice say it creates a sense of false fairness to guarantee 7% quota to Norway or Vatican city and to China or India. This has caused people from smaller countries to immigrate on a larger scale while causing dismay to people from largely populated areas.

Critics of the immigration system argue that the skilled immigration numbers are already too high. Pro-immigrants consider expanding their numbers to ease their burden.

It would be highly plausible that the entire backlog for skilled workers could be removed in a few years if one just removes the 7% quota and even keep the 140,000 number the same. That way both the critics and the pro-immigrants have a good compromise.

Backlogs could be removed simply because the number of H1B's, the primary temporary skilled worker visas, even at the peak of their usage had less than 140,000 approved petitions.

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