Self-Destruction – Opposing, Even Hating Immigration

 

As the United States under Donald Trump severely limited the HIB visa program, cutting off a growth-directed effort to attract educated STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) immigrées, making it difficult even for those already here to remain here and almost impossible for them to bring their spouses and children, Canada stepped up its immigrant recruitment. As so many STEM jobs remain unfilled here, Canada swooped up so many super-qualified candidates who used to dream of working in America. With their loved ones! Ads welcoming qualified immigrants (see above) made it a point to contrast the restrictive US barriers against the welcoming arms of so many Canadian provinces. Well before the pandemic. 

But as the pandemic wanes, those American STEM jobs remain horrifically unfilled, even with significant attractive wage and salary offers. There just are not enough US- grads in these fields to fill the openings. And since tech growth is a significant underpinning to our economic recovery, the damage done to our recruitment efforts is not so easily repaired, particularly as the pandemic has slammed into some nations mired in massive variant outbreaks. Also, those recruits who moved to Canada have no plans to redirect their futures into the United States. A seriously xenophobic Trumpian constituency still holds sway over the Republican Party, even as corporate America clamors for a more realistic revised immigration policy.

Even as the United States faces an indigenous contraction in indigenous birthrates – 1.76 live births per adult female which is well below the 2.1 replacement rate – as well as massive numbers of unfilled jobs, we are simply unable to meet demand. Our history of economic growth, particularly in the modern era, has been rather dramatically driven by immigration with stunning results.

“Immigrant entrepreneurs have played a remarkably outsize role in the growth of the U.S. economy. More than half of the country’s billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants, and 80% employ immigrants in a management role or in core product design. Consider America’s first four trillion-dollar companies, which together employ nearly 700,000 people in the United States: One was cofounded by an immigrant (Google), two were founded by the children of immigrants (Amazon and Apple), and one is currently run by an immigrant (Microsoft). Immigrants to the U.S have won 39% of the country’s Nobel Prizes, hold 28% of high-impact patents, and earn 31% of the PhDs from American universities, all while comprising only 18% of the American workforce. While native-born Americans are also highly talented, America’s reputation for innovation and scientific excellence brings the world’s best and brightest to our doorstep…

“But global competition for these highly skilled professionals is becoming much more intense. Many countries, like the U.K., Australia, and Canada, have implemented immigration pathways specifically for entrepreneurs or, like China, have developed aggressive talent recruitment programs. One Canadian business even launched an ad campaign in California last year to convince tech workers uncertain about their immigration status to abandon their U.S. visa applications and move north.

“Despite this rise of global competitors, the U.S. has no ‘startup visa’ specifically for entrepreneurs. While the U.S. Congress has considered but failed to pass such a measure for more than a decade, almost 40 other countries all over the world have rolled out their own programs to poach global entrepreneurial talent. 

“It’s not all bad news, though: The Biden administration recently announced its intention to fully implement the International Entrepreneur Rule. Initiated in the final days of the Obama administration, this measure gives the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security authority to grant temporary permission to live and work here for those who could provide ‘a significant public benefit’ to the United States. The International Entrepreneur Rule allows promising startup founders to meet that standard by hitting milestones in U.S. job creation, capital investment, or revenue.”  Tech policy analysts Lindsay Milliken and Doug Rand writing for the June 30th FastCompany.com

Trump even threw foreign graduate students out of the country, those studying STEM subjects here – a body of US-trained experts with a proclivity to remain in the states after graduation. Tech companies across the land screamed in protest, but populist Trump, catering to his anti-immigrant constituency, found ways to blame immigrants for a litany of horribles for which they were most certainly not responsible… denying these desperate corporate pleas. 

Not surprisingly, a number of American tech conglomerates simply opened new research and development facilities in those “other countries” that welcomed these STEM immigrants. We lost and will continue to feel those ripples of loss for decades to come. We just became that much less competitive. We lost the jobs that those immigrants will now create for the other countries that welcomed them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for a land built by immigrants, it is amazing to watch the self-destructive idiocy of denying this country’s access to so many of the best and brightest.