High-skilled immigration to be addressed in Schumer-Graham bill

A report released this week by the Center for American Progress (CAP) includes recommendations that could serve as a blue-print of sorts for a broad immigration reform bill being crafted by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Immigration subcommittee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
 
An overhaul of the U.S. immigration laws has for years been a high priority for technology companies that say they need more H-1B visas and green-cards to hire high-skilled workers and keep the industry competitive on a global scale. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and others make yearly pilgrimages to Washington to make their cases for lifting the visa caps.  The topic came up at least a dozen times in last week’s job summit at the White House.
 
The CEOs of companies including Intel, HP, Dell and Cisco sent a letter to President Barack Obama last week listing high-skilled workers as a key to creating jobs.

“We should do everything possible to retain highly educated foreign professionals already in this country whose companies want them to stay, and those individuals seeking advanced degrees at our college and universities,” they said in the letter.

Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have gotten behind Schumer, who listed high-skilled immigration as one of seven pillars he would incorporate into his overhaul. A Schumer-Graham bill is expected to be introduced in February.
 
The Center for American Progress, the think tank led by John Podesta, is the primary outside group working with the White House and Senate members on the issue. High-skilled workers will only be part of the debate, which will also include curbing illegal immigration, a biometric-based employer verification system and a proposal to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.
 
CAP will also be working with a number of industries—technology, agriculture, healthcare—and minority and community groups that all have different concerns and priorities when it comes to immigration.
 

To address the H-1B visa problem, for example, CAP recommends the government establish a market-based system that allows the supply of visas to grow and shrink to reflect the demand for workers. In its report, CAP said only around 261,000 of the 1.9 million visas issued in 2008 went to high-skilled professionals.
 
“It’s about job creation,” said Ralph Hellmann, senior vice president of the Information Technology Industry Council. “High-skilled people come here and create businesses. When we innovate, we create big companies.”

He pointed out that some of the biggest technology success stories—Intel, Google, Ebay and Yahoo—were founded by people born outside the United States.

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