FOUR H-1B MYTHS

With this H-1B season having drawn to an early close (due to USCIS receiving an overwhelming number of petitions), and with legislative immigration reform still pending, the time seems opportune to dispel a number of myths about the program.

First, some general facts: the H-1B program was created in 1990 to allow U.S. employers to hire up to 65,000 foreign workers (plus 20,000 more with advanced degrees--starting in 2004) in specialty occupations (i.e., typically high-skill work) for a period of three years (renewable once--with shorter extensions available for workers with pending employment green card applications).

So far, about half of all H-1B workers seem to have come from China and India alone. And about half lived in the United States under a different status (often as students) before obtaining their H-1B visa.

The numerical cap (from which institutions of higher education, not-for-profit organizations and government-research organizations became exempt in 2000) was temporarily increased to 115,000 in fiscal years 1999 and 2000, and to 195,000 in fiscal years 2001, 2002 and 2003 (the only time when supply exceeded demand).

Systems analysis and programming occupations tend to account for over one-third of all petitions in any given year. And, more generally, STEM occupations tend to account for almost two-thirds of all petitions. Between five and ten percent are in higher education (mostly biology and life sciences).

Although the demand for H-1Bs tends to be distributed across a large variety of employers, nonetheless, a few large tech and consulting (or staffing) companies account for a disproportionate share (though less than 20%). They include US-based companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte, but also Indian companies such as Tata and Infosys.

The largest geographical concentration of H-1B employees is in the New York metro area (which, perhaps surprisingly, boasts numbers as high as the three great California tech centers combined). For more information, read this 2012 Brookings Institution report.

Now for the myths:

2013 IMMIGRATION REFORM = DREAM + STEM - DV?

The prospect of US immigration reform in 2013 is becoming increasingly clear for at least two categories of aspiring immigrants: DREAMers (a somewhat larger group than current DACA beneficiaries--as described in my last post--including mostly unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the US as minors, often from Latin America) and STEMs (a smaller group including foreign students--often from Asia--who graduate from US universities with advanced degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Although, lately, DREAMers have received more news coverage (and understandably so, considering their numbers, their activism and the compelling "humanitarian" dimension of their story), current government debates suggest that STEMs stand to benefit from equal (if not stronger) bipartisan support in gaining (perhaps even faster) access to permanent residence visas. For example, last September, House Republicans and Senate Democrats introduced very similar bills offering new green cards to 55,000 STEMs per year.

This consensus is consistent with the fact that, as the US Department of Labor has acknowledged, the US faces a serious education and workforce deficit in STEM fields, with dire consequences for global competitiveness and growth, whereas, for instance, according to the Kaufman Foundation of Entrepreneurship, the proportion of new Silicon Valley firms that had at least one key founder who was foreign-born declined from an incredibly high 52% between 1995 and 2005 to a still very high 43.9% between 2006 and 2012 (24.3% for engineering and technology firms in the country at large).

However, the Republican STEM bill, which passed the House last week (quickly following President Obama's re-election with a large share of the Hispanic vote), also included a trade-off in the form of provisions eliminating the Diversity Visa (DV) program--the reason for which Senate Democrats rejected it this week. The DV program, an annual lottery administered by the State Department, provides about 50,000 permanent residence visas to citizens of countries with traditionally low immigration to the US--especially from Africa.