Saroj Aryal graduated from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2000 with a computer science degree, earned with highest honors. Aryal, from Nepal, now works as a computer software test engineer in the Twin Cities. At night, he is studying for an MBA at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School.
Aryal is just the sort of ambitious, high-tech professional that Minnesota needs in order to compete in the global economy. "Minneapolis has a great intellectual climate," he says. "This is where I want to put down roots."
The good news is that Aryal wants to use his talents here. The bad news is that U.S. immigration laws make it maddeningly difficult to do that.
America is in an uproar concerning how to deal with its roughly 11 million illegal immigrants, most of them unskilled workers. Left out of this clamor are foreign-born engineers, chemists and computer scientists seeking a legal route to permanent residency. They will be vital to this nation's economic success in the 21st century.
America needs research scientists and high-tech professionals, but our schools aren't producing enough of our own. In 2000, 51 percent of engineers with doctorates in this country were foreign born, as were 45 percent of life scientists, physical scientists, and mathematical and computer scientists with Ph.Ds, according to a 2004 National Science Foundation report.
Yet the U.S. government caps visas for highly skilled workers -- called H-1B visas --such as Aryal at 65,000 a year, with 20,000 more available for H-1B workers who have U.S. graduate degrees. (These numbers total about one-half of 1 percent of the U.S. workforce.) This artificially low quota does not reflect market forces and bears little or no relation to employers' needs.
As a result, many skilled foreigners face a huge visa backlog. Often, they must wait five or more years to get a green card, or permanent residency visa. While they wait, the law compels these ambitious high-achievers to put their careers and lives on hold. If they take a promotion, or if their employers transfer them to another city, they can get knocked back to square one of the visa process. The penalty can be the same if they take a better job with another company.
"I hear people complain if they have to wait 15 minutes in a line to renew their driver's license," Aryal says. "In the immigration process, people like me have to wait and live with uncertainty for five or six years. You can't imagine the frustration if you haven't been through it."
Needless to say, employers find it difficult to tap their foreign-born employees' full potential under these circumstances. Artificial visa caps can also harm U.S. companies by leaving them unable to hire key personnel for months at a time.
Are these foreign workers taking American jobs? No. Before hiring them, employers must document that no qualified U.S. citizen is available.
"The fact is, people with this level of skill are tremendous net job creators," says Peter Yost, an immigration attorney with the Faegre and Benson law firm in Minneapolis. "They make many of the research breakthroughs, and their marketing expertise expands sales opportunities for U.S. companies around the globe."
Highly skilled immigrants also bring a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit. During the dot-com boom, immigrants made up one-third of the scientific and engineering workforce in California's Silicon Valley, and Indian or Chinese CEOs ran one-fourth of the region's high-tech firms, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California. Intel, eBay and Google are among the many superstar companies with foreign-born founders or cofounders.
Why should talented noncitizens put up with our nation's retrogressive immigration laws? Increasingly, many are saying, "Forget it."
And America is the loser. Today, we are training scientific experts, only to see them move to places such as Great Britain or Canada, which offer fast and easy paths to permanent residency. There they often compete with U.S. companies.
Aryal says he has friends from Nepal who chose to attend school in Australia, because they can quickly get permanent residency there.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty knows this. He has lobbied Congress to increase the number of visas for scientific and technical professionals. In addition, he wants to create an immigrant investor visa regional center in Minnesota, to induce foreigners to move here, establish businesses and create jobs.
The stakes in this debate are high for Minnesota and its technology-driven companies, from 3M to Medtronic. "Our ability to be a leading-edge state in high technology is clearly in jeopardy if companies here can't tap the expertise of foreign nationals," Yost says. "It is very detrimental for Minnesota to let these people go."
Source: -http://www.startribune.com/191/story/374470.html
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