Highly-Skilled Immigrants Make a Big Impact
If you want a quick example of how an immigrant entrepreneur has affected your life, you probably don’t need to look any further than the glowing screen in front of you.
Intel Corporation, whose processors are currently in nearly 80 percent of all computers, grew significantly under the direction of Hungarian immigrant Andy Grove. If you found this page using Google, you can thank Google, Inc.’s co-founder and Russian immigrant Sergey Brin. Ever buy anything off eBay? French-born entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar founded the online auction site.
In fact, one in four U.S. tech startups in the last decade had at least one foreigner as a founder or high-ranking executive, according to a report from Duke University.
The influence of highly skilled immigrants extends much farther than Silicon Valley. According to a report from the Migration Policy Institute, over 21 percent of doctors, nearly 8 percent of educators and over 15 percent of engineers are foreign born. Nearly half of scientists and engineers in the U.S. workforce with a doctorate in their field are immigrants, according to a separate report from the Harvard Business School.
Those are significant numbers, and few would argue the value of highly skilled immigrants, but the challenge comes in crafting smart immigration policy that fairly addresses the large number of people who apply to come to the U.S. every year. It’s an issue we talked about in the last Homeland Vignette when we introduced Wei-Jen Chua, a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis.
In today’s clip, Wei-Jen talks a little more about the work she’s doing and her concerns about finding a company willing to handle all the paperwork required to hire a foreign-born worker:
Wei-Jen seems most worried about companies finding the visa process too daunting. Groups like the Immigration Policy Center say that the number of H-1B visas, which are designatd for highly skilled workers, should be raised in response to demand. What are your thoughts on the caps on the number of visas granted every year? Should highly skilled immigrants be given any sort of special treatment/preference?
Video edited by Dustin Karrer. Footage shot for the Homeland documentary series.
Category: Economy
