Partnership for a New American Economy

Los Angeles Times
June 26, 2012

Foreign-born inventors are responsible for more than three-quarters of the patents that emerged from top American research universities last year, according to a new report.

The Partnership for a New American Economy, a bipartisan nonprofit group composed of hundreds of mayors and business leaders and co-chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, released the report Tuesday as part of its effort to reform immigration policies.

The report is based on a study of 1,466 patents from the country’s top 10 patent-generating schools, including the University of California system, Stanford and Caltech. Such universities account for more than half of all basic research in the country.

Out of the 76% of patents that came from work conducted by immigrants, 99% were in science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM). The U.S. is projected to have a shortage of 230,000 advanced degree workers in such STEM fields by 2018, according to the report.

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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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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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