Partnership for a New American Economy

The Atlantic
June 21, 2012

During the past month, a handful of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate reached across the partisan divide to introduce the Startup Act 2.0, a bill to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs in the United States by easing restrictions on immigration. It's a great bill, but it could be better. In addition to its immigration measures, it should also advance a plan to boost entrepreneurship and technical skills at home. Here's one important way to do that: Encourage public schools to teach American children how to code just after they learn to multiply.

Despite the nation's unemployment rate, the Startup Act rests on the assumption that the United States lacks the talent to fill today's demand for high-skilled engineers and entrepreneurs. That assumption is probably right: A report released by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Partnership for New York City predicts that by 2018, there will be 800,000 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs in the United States that require a master's degree or higher -- and only around 550,000 American-graduates with this training.

This scarcity of talent has received a lot of attention in connection with high-flying Silicon Valley companies: Google threw around $100 and $50 million offers to keep their top talent from fleeing to Twitter, and some companies pay tens of thousands to recruiters for even junior talent. Startups feel the same pressure: TechCrunch describes a "war for talent" among young firms, and anyone who has chatted with the CEO of a fast-growing tech company knows how much time they devote to identifying and wooing top technical talent.

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The Washington Post
June 21, 2012

The Pew Research Center’s recent study concluding that the number of Asian immigrants moving to the United States now exceeds the number of Latinos hardly seems surprising to me or many of my fellow immigration attorneys. My law firm, Wildes & Weinberg P.C., which has focused exclusively on United States immigration matters for more than 50 years, has seen a dramatic uptick in the number of our clients who are of Asian origin in the last several years, many of them of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Chinese descent.

And of those, many, if not the majority, are highly skilled workers who meet the qualifications for H-1B professional nonimmigrant visas.

The H-1B visa is the visa that affords its holder the ability to have “dual intent;” that is, the holder of the H-1B can intend to reside in the U.S. permanently by applying for lawful permanent residence, despite the otherwise temporary nature of the visa. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult for employers to sponsor their employees for H-1B visas. This is largely due to increasingly exhaustive review of such applications by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

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CNBC
June 21, 2012

The technology sector, one of the most vibrant, crucial segments of the economy, needs immigrants to thrive, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers said Thursday.

“I look at Silicon Valley, the most successful part of the American economy. I see my company being a third immigrants and two-thirds minorities,” he said on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”

“To me, these people are the people like the Italians and the Irish before them that came in and built this country. I think we ought to quit screwing around with them. I think (President) Obama’s move is political, but so what? I’ll take what i can get.”

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Wall Street Journal
June 20, 2012

President Obama thrust immigration back into the spotlight last week with his executive order halting deportations for certain young illegal immigrants. In the context of America's jobs crisis, however, this is the wrong immigration issue to focus on. Our most pressing immigration problem marched across platforms at American colleges and universities in recent weeks—skilled foreign-born graduates whom we do not adequately incentivize to stay and work here.

At the Tuck School's graduation ceremony this month, I proudly read the names of 277 M.B.A. graduates. The Tuck class of 2012 was 35% foreign-born, representing countries from Australia to Zimbabwe. Many of these graduates chose Tuck over peer schools abroad because they aimed to apply their world-class U.S. education in the U.S. labor market. The same is true across academic fields. Today nearly 42% of all U.S. doctorate-level science and engineering workers are foreign-born.

Won't more immigrant graduates staying in America mean fewer jobs for Americans? No. On the contrary, they will create jobs for Americans—in large corporations and new companies alike. Large companies that hire skilled immigrants tend to hire more U.S. nationals as well. Bill Gates has testified that for every immigrant hire at Microsoft, an average of four non-immigrant employees are hired.

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