Partnership for a New American Economy

The New York Times
June 25, 2012

Arguing against immigration policies that force foreign-born innovators to leave the United States, a new study to be released on Tuesday shows that immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities.

Conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit group co-founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, the study notes that nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth.

The report points out that while many of the world’s top foreign-born innovators are trained at United States universities, after graduation they face “daunting or insurmountable immigration hurdles that force them to leave and bring their talents elsewhere.”

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Washington Post
June 24, 2012

President Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney spoke a day apart at a conference for Latino elected officials last week, both framing immigration reform as an necessity to spur economic growth.

For Romney, the speech before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) in Orlando marked the first time the Republican candidate shifted the focus of his campaign from the economic recovery to immigration. The move came days after Obama announced his administration would stop deporting hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants.

Romney spoke of a softer approach to immigration reform, pledging to overhaul the green card system for immigrants with families and end immigration caps for their spouses and minor children.

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Los Angeles Times
June 22, 2012

Every harvest season, U.S. produce growers have a narrow window in which the success of an entire year's work is dependent on human labor. With some crops, this window is only a few days. But finding a secure, reliable workforce to bring in the harvest can be extremely difficult. Over the last decade, American farmers have floated many ideas for remedying this situation, but they haven't been able to stir up the political will to change a broken immigration system.

Both political parties share in the failure to act. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, yet there was no action on immigration reform. Republicans, who claim to be solidly behind American farmers, have also dropped the ball on immigration, using the issue only to scare voters and win elections. Members of both parties clearly understand that farmworkers do not take jobs away from American workers, and yet they resist introducing reforms.

One exception to the impasse came in 2006. That year, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the need was so great for a particular class of worker that they cooperated in finding a way to allow noncitizens across our borders. The legislation, passed by Congress and signed into law by PresidentGeorge W. Bush, created a new guest-worker visa program for foreign-born athletes entering the U.S. to begin careers in professional hockey, basketball and baseball.

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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 Emporia Gazette
June 21, 2012

The Kansans I talk to every week back home want to know how Congress is going to address our country’s economic challenges and help create jobs for Americans.

But in Washington, “conventional wisdom” says Congress does little during an election year. With 40 consecutive months of unemployment above 8 percent, and half of all college graduates unable to find work, the time to act is now – not after the election, not next year.

The good news is there is a bipartisan plan in Congress, called Startup Act 2.0, which will help jumpstart the economy through the creation and growth of new businesses. Entrepreneurs and the businesses they create are vital to the strength and competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Research by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City found that nearly all net new job creation in the United States between 1980 and 2005 came from companies less than 5 years old. In fact, new businesses create approximately 3 million jobs each year.

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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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The New York Times
June 21, 2012

Mitt Romney on Thursday offered what he called a strategy for “bipartisan and long-term immigration reform” in an address to a convention of Latino elected officials in Florida.

In the speech, which also touched on the economy, Mr. Romney dropped the confrontational tone he took on immigration during the Republican primary. Instead, he promised to work in a series of areas to help immigrants and their families while discouraging people from coming to the country illegally.
Interactive Video Feature
Mitt Romney’s Positions on Immigration

An interactive video feature examines how Mitt Romney has had to finesse his position on illegal immigration as he pivots towards the general election.

“Immigration reform is not just a moral imperative, but an economic necessity as well,” Mr. Romney said. “We can find common ground here, and we must. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to ensure that our country remains a land of opportunity – both for those who were born here and for those who share our values, respect our laws, and want to come to our shores.”

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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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Minnesota 2020
June 21, 2012

Democratic principles and institutions, harnessing the energy, ambition and talent of immigrants, have always been one of the main drivers of the U.S. economy. At this time, when the U.S. is losing its position of preeminence, other nations are following our success formula while we are rejecting it out of fear over global economic uncertainty.

In a recent study, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that “… we are quickly losing our edge as other countries adopt smarter economic-driven immigration policies.” Earlier this month in Minnesota, Jeremy Robbins, policy advisor to Mayor Bloomberg and Partnership for a New American Economy, moderated a discussion involving several of the state’s top business leaders on this subject. Ecolab CEO Douglas Baker, Carlson CEO Hubert Joly and Cargill Corporate VP Michael Fernandez formed the panel of the event titled “Immigration Leads to Economic Growth and American Jobs.”

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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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