Skills Visa Act good for America

Hawaii companies have benefited in recent years from highly skilled employees or college students from abroad. This state, as well as others, would gain from an increase in the number of foreign workers with expertise in areas such as science, engineering and computer programming. The changes should be approved as part of the comprehensive immigration bill before Congress or by itself.

Degree-seeking foreign graduate students at the University of Hawaii number 716 out of the total graduate enrollment of 5,542 and account for more than one-fourth of the graduate students in the College of Engineering. Nationally, more than 40 percent of all graduate students in engineering programs are from abroad, according to the National Science Foundation.

Nearly 800 foreign workers in Hawaii from abroad have entered the country on H-1B visas — more than 200 in the first half of this year — in occupations such as science, engineering and computer programming. But the demand, here and nationwide, has greatly surpassed the limit on these visas.

"I think it’s actually a really big win, not just for foreign students but for the United States," said Ian Kitajima, a senior executive at Oceanit, one of Hawaii’s top science and engineering companies.

Among Oceanit’s employees is Vinod Veedu, who earned his Ph.D. in engineering at UH and has produced a dozen patents since being hired as a nanotechnology specialist in 2006.

Like other states, Hawaii needs a diversity of people to spark innovation as well as to reach out to young people and lure interest in sciences, as Veedu and colleagues have done via high school robotics and use of television.

"When you’re called a scientist, you’re not that reachable," Veedu told the Star-Advertiser’s Susan Essoyan. "You live in your own world, a science bubble."

The immigration bill that passed the U.S. Senate last month would increase the limit of H-1B recipients nationally from the current 65,000 a year to 110,000 immediately, and as many as 180,000 a year depending on demand. A total of 25,000 visas — up from the 20,000 limit — would be set aside for people with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math from an American school. That would add to, and complement, top-notch brain power that could grow America’s economy. Consider that a substantial 44 percent of Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies that launched 2006-2012 had at least one immigrant founder; in that period nationally, 1 in 4 such start-ups had an immigrant co-founder.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee has approved four immigration bills, including the Skills Visa Act, which would increase the visa cap to 155,000. It would raise the number of foreign graduate students at U.S. universities to 40,000. Unlike the immigration bill in the Democratic-controlled Senate, the House bill that is limited to highly skilled foreign workers and students passed the committee on a party-line vote, with all Democrats and only one Republican voting against it.

That is because the powerful U.S. labor lobby wrongly maintains that the tech industry wants only to depress wages and bring in cheaper temporary workers from overseas. It claims to want equally qualified Americans to be hired before the hiring of foreigners.

However, a recent Brookings Institution analysis found that in the 10 cities that bring in the largest number of high-skilled guest workers on H-1B visas, college-educated Americans who can compete for jobs with high-skilled foreign workers are not more likely to be unemployed. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that growth in high-skilled immigration would result in "slightly higher" productivity and higher wages overall.

The chances of congressional approval along the immigration front remain uncertain. House Speaker John Boehner said on Monday he will not move the Senate bill to the House floor. Instead, he said the House "is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill."

Hopefully, that will include the Skills Visa Act and other measures that can be prudently reconciled with the Senate version.