WCA September 2012

From the americas

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.” 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 6 th 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 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”

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,” 25 th 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: On 22 nd 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.’” 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. Musing in “Mittspeak,” Ms Collins wrote: 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!

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Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2012