EuroWire November 2018

Transatlantic cable

That goes for both high-skilled and low-skilled immigrant workers, they were told by Francine D Blau, an economist at Cornell University in upstate New York. “A lot of our labour-force growth comes from immigrants and their children,” said Ms Blau. “Without them, we’d suffer the problems associated with countries with an ageing population, like Japan.” US loss, Canadian gain The H-1B programme, a long-time target for politicians in the USA, has been treated before in this space. As noted by the Times , while it was created to bring in foreigners with skills that business leaders argued would strengthen the economy, the visa has been criticised on grounds that some corporations have exploited it to replace American workers. But many economists say H-1B holders are valuable to the domestic economy and this view is supported by the data. According to the Times reporters, immigrants file patents at twice the rate of native-born Americans, and found some 25 per cent of the high-tech companies launched in the United States. Messrs Schwartz and Lohr acknowledged that the effect of lower-skilled immigrants is more debatable. George J Borjas, a Harvard economist, has found that an influx of such workers reduced the incomes of people without a high school diploma between three and five per cent. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, agrees that individual workers can be hurt by competition from lower-paid foreigners. But he said the overall effect on wages was modest; moreover immigration tends to bolster the incomes of college-educated Americans. † Domestic businesses are not alone in their visa-related concerns. Foreign workers, too, are growing frustrated about the clampdown on visas and rising anti-immigrant sentiment. As one example, Uday Verma is leaving after 12 years in Iowa, where he earned a graduate degree in computer science and worked for a technology company. Mr Verma, 37, who emigrated from India, told the Times that he has repeatedly renewed his H-1B visa while waiting fruitlessly for permanent residency – the so-called “green card” status. “I can’t make a plan here,” he said. “You’re perpetually in this state of limbo. It just doesn’t make sense any more to stay here and keep pursuing this American dream.” Mr Verma, his wife and their nine-year-old son planned to be living in Toronto by the time their US visas expired in mid-September. † The Verma family is taking advantage of the Global Talent Stream initiative started last year by the Canadian government. It lets companies in innovative fields quickly secure visas for workers with vital skills. “With his experience with artificial intelligence (AI) programming tools, Mr Verma got a visa in two weeks,” wrote the Times reporters. “And [he] could become a permanent Canadian resident in six months or so.” Dorothy Fabian USA Editor

Immigration

Both US companies and the immigrants they seek to hire are suffering the effects of toughened constraints on the H-1B visa “There’s absolutely no research that supports the idea that cutting legal immigration is good for the economy,” Ethan Lewis, a Dartmouth economist, told the New York Times . Even so, according to Times reporters Nelson D Schwartz and Steve Lohr, the administration of President Donald Trump is using the “vast and nearly opaque” immigration bureaucracy of the United States to constrict the flow of foreign workers by throwing up new roadblocks to legal arrivals. (“Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration,” 2 nd September) They disclosed that the government is denying work visas, delaying approvals, and asking applicants to provide additional information more frequently than just a year earlier. As businesses say they are struggling to fill jobs with the foreign workers they need, corporate executives worry about the long-term impact of losing talented engineers and programmers to countries like Canada that are laying out the welcome mat for skilled foreigners. In April 2017, Mr Trump signed a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, directing government officials to “rigorously enforce” immigration laws. A few months later, he endorsed legislation that would cut legal immigration by half. Because congressional leaders, including members of the president’s Republican party, have not advanced it, some lawmakers have said that Mr Trump is using administrative means to reshape immigration policy because those changes have stalled on Capitol Hill. Dampened growth over time But Mr Trump is not one to be constrained where one of his hobby-horse causes is involved, and meanwhile businesses say the increased red tape deriving from his executive order has made it harder to secure the services of overseas applicants by means of the H-1B visa allowing American businesses to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations. With the US unemployment rate having fallen to 3.9 per cent, this has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers. A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 per cent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications – a classic delaying tactic – doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr Trump issued his order. Looking forward, the Times reporters referenced experts who say a sustained reduction in immigration could dampen growth over time as more baby boomers retire, leaving big gaps in the job market.

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November 2018