As the face-off between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris draws nearer, the United States is awash in partisan rancor, with the candidates and their supporters fighting bitterly over abortion, the southern border, taxes, health care, and more. Yet even though Democrats and Republicans are miles apart on most policy matters, they have nevertheless demonstrated a common renewed faith in one particular tool of economic statecraft: industrial policy….
If the United States wants to succeed in the global competition for talent, there is little time to waste. Other countries are already rushing to poach workers that are unable (or unwilling) to settle in the United States. Last June, Canada unveiled a new Tech Talent Strategy, which grants a three-year work permit to up to 10,000 people who hold H1-B visas in the United States to come to Canada, with work or study permits for accompanying family members. The program reached 10,000 applications in less than 48 hours. Germany, for its part, has rolled out a job seeker visa that grants temporary entry for foreign workers so that they can find employment.
In the past year, the Biden administration has taken modest steps to streamline processing for highly skilled workers. In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security announced several changes to the H1-B program, including extending the grace period for graduates seeking to stay in the United States as they transition from student to work visas. The administration also issued an expansive executive order providing guidance to simplify visa applications and processing times for noncitizens with experience in critical and emerging technologies.
For years, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have been unwilling to consider high-skilled immigration reform outside of a comprehensive immigration solution. Biden deserves credit for waking up to the United States’ talent crunch. But his administration’s tepid position is no longer tenable. Any viable solution will require both executive and legislative action.
If congressional leaders can break this impasse, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to grab. For starters, Congress could increase the annual cap for H1-B visas. There is precedent for this. In the 1990s, Congress temporarily increased the annual cap from 65,000 to 115,000 visas and later to 195,000, as the United States scrambled to find computer programmers to address the dreaded “Millennium Bug,” a computer flaw that experts worried could wreak havoc because the original code used by most machines could not deal with dates beyond December 31, 1999.
Even if the number of temporary visas were increased, the H1-B lottery has other shortcomings: it creates significant uncertainty for job seekers and lacks any sense of prioritization. No private-sector firm would randomly select their future employees, nor does it make sense for the U.S. government to do so when admitting its workers. The U.S. government should set up a system that prioritizes individuals working in sectors or possessing skills that are uniquely in high demand in any given year, a system made possible by the growing sophistication of AI-driven predictive analytics.
Even without congressional action, the executive branch could provide automatic work authorization for the spouses of H1-B workers, who currently must apply separately for permission to work in the United States. One study has shown that 90 percent of H1-B spouses have at least a bachelor’s degree, and half of those degrees are in STEM fields. The Department of Homeland Security has the authority to immediately extend work authorization to H1-B spouses, an action it could take if it wanted to.
When it comes to permanent residency, it is unlikely that there will be much political appetite to increase the overall number of green cards. It is easier, however, to envisage a change that would reduce the number of family reunification–related green cards and increase the number of work-related green cards—a rebalancing that would enhance the larger national interest.
Another relatively simple fix would be to reform or remove the country-specific caps built into the green card process. The statistics, compiled by the economist William Kerr, are undeniable: Chinese and Indian inventors are responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. patents; around half of all international students come from China and India and are disproportionately concentrated in STEM fields; and immigrants from these two countries account for eight in ten H1-B visas issued each year. In the face of these numbers, and with China and India accounting for one-third of the world’s population, limiting each country to seven percent of the United States’ total annual pool of green cards makes little sense.
Another idea that has been proposed is the “recapturing” of unused green cards, another move within the executive’s purview. For bureaucratic, financial, or other reasons, including pandemic-era delays, there have been years when green card caps have not been met. Some experts have called for the administration to recapture those unused green cards (more than 200,000 in number), which would make an immediate dent in the backlog. There is precedent for this maneuver, and, best of all, it would not require legislative action, although explicit congressional approval could expand the total number of unused green cards put back into circulation.
WITHIN REACH
For the past several decades, the political class in Washington has been obsessed with managing and controlling illegal immigration. It is high time policymakers devoted the same degree of attention to legal—and especially high-skilled—immigration.
Just as there is a bipartisan consensus behind industrial policy among politicians, there is also a bipartisan consensus among voters that the United States should do more to encourage high-skilled immigration; three of four respondents in a December 2022 Bipartisan Policy Center survey embraced expanding high-skilled immigration, including 68 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Democrats. And in the past, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined forces to adjust immigration rules that would strengthen the United States’ standing at a time of geopolitical stress and technological upheaval.
Today is another such time. In a globalized world, top talent goes to the highest bidder. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States’ unique ability to attract immigrant labor facilitated the country’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. In the twenty-first century, maintaining a position of technological dominance will require the United States to retain its status as the destination of choice for the most skilled workers. The bipartisan “Made in America” vision can become reality, but only if it is built by harnessing the talent of immigrants.
Multicultural Meanderings 