WCA September 2012

66 / 136

64
From theamericas
Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2012
Andrew Martin of the International Herald Tribune noted
that Mr Bloomberg’s group had previously called attention
to some other nations’ aggressive courtship of highly skilled
foreign-born citizens of the United States, urging a return to
their home countries.
The Partnership for a New American Economy supports
legislation that would make it easier for foreign-born STEM
graduates and entrepreneurs to stay put. (“Immigrants Are
Crucial to Innovation, Study Says,” 25th June).
In one illustration of the issue, Mr Martin wrote, the study notes
that nine out of ten patents at the University of Illinois system
in 2011 had at least one foreign-born inventor. Of those, 64 per
cent had a foreign inventor who was not yet a professor but
rather a student, researcher, or postdoctoral fellow.
❖ ❖ Under the current system, foreign-born students are
permitted to remain in the United States for 12 to 29
months after graduation, provided they find a job or
internship in their field. After that, efforts to obtain a
more permanent visa are constrained by such factors
as country quotas. The Partnership for a New American
Economy study notes that China is entitled to the same
number of visas as Iceland.
❖ ❖ The clear sentiment of the last sentence – that certain
categories of immigrant are more welcome than others
– is expressed quite unabashedly in discussions of
US immigration policy. Some commentators have noted
the uneasy fit it makes with a few lines of verse graven
on a tablet within the pedestal on which stands the
Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
On 22nd June, New York Times Op-Ed writer Gail Collins
recalled Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s
strategy for commending himself to American Hispanics:
“The key, he explained last year, is to tell them ‘what they
know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not
come here for a handout.’”
Musing in “Mittspeak,” Ms Collins wrote:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses bearing PhD’s and master’s
degrees in civil engineering or computer science . . .
The number of foreign-born small business owners in the
US has increased in tandem with the immigrant workforce.
The role of immigrants in the small-business economy
of the United States has expanded by 50 per cent since
1990, to the point that almost one-fifth of owners with
fewer than 100 employees were born outside the country.
Immigrant Small Business Owners: a Significant and
growing Part of the Economy, from the Fiscal Policy Institute
(FPI), also traced the origins of the owners and found the
Mediterranean and Middle East to be well represented. At
least 10 per cent of workers from Italy, Greece, Israel, Syria,
Iran, Lebanon and Jordan are business owners.
Analysing US Census data, the institute determined that, in
1990, immigrants made up about nine per cent of American
workers and 12 per cent of small business owners.
By 2010, the foreign-born share of the workforce had grown
to 16 per cent, and immigrants made up 18 per cent of
small business owners.
In the view of David Dyssegaard Kallick, a fellow at the FPI
who authored the report, this immigrant-ownership growth
– mainly in service enterprises – has gone from modest to
“pretty substantial.”
Mr Kallick told Bloomberg Businessweek reporter John
Tozzi in New York that the national conversation about
immigrants’ role in the economy is often dominated by two
oversimplified ideas. Immigration is seen as a magic bullet
to revive a stagnant economy; or, immigrants are seen
strictly in terms of competition with the native-born for jobs.
While not wishing to overstate the impact of immigrants on
job growth, he said, “People sometimes don’t realise that
when immigrants come into the economy, the economy also
grows.”
Information technology companies in
India look for – and find – a way around
the squeeze on US work visas
“Bangalore, stymied by the visa shortage, hires in the US”
The headline, in the “Global Economcs” section of
Bloomberg Businessweek (26 th June), references a problem
faced by companies across India’s extensive IT industry.
With the US unemployment rate higher than eight per cent,
and Indian outsourcing already an issue in the American
presidential election set for 6th November, the two types of
visas on which Indian IT companies rely to get their workers
into the United States are getting even harder to obtain.
One of these visas is the H-1B, which the US reserves for
people with specific types of training. The other is the L-1B,
for employees with specialised knowledge. “Rejection rates
are way up,” Scott Staples, president of the US unit of
MindTree, an Indian outsourcing company in Bangalore, told
Bloomberg. “It’s so much harder to get visas approved.”
MindTree has 11,000 employees doing work for customers
in a number of industries. Most are based in India but,
because the company wants some of these workers to be
close to the clients, MindTree has 850 employees in the US,
working in 36 of the 50 states.
Some are US citizens or holders of the “green card”
(essentially a permanent visa). But about 60 per cent have
entered the country on one of the two types of short-term
work visas that are now in short supply.
Bruce Einhorn, a Bloomberg Asia regional editor, noted that
big Indian companies such as Tata Consultancy Services,
Infosys and Wipro have become global outsourcing powers.
Most of their workers are in Bangalore, Mumbai and other
Indian cities; but, like their smaller rival MindTree, the