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Tech honchos may break immigration logjam to get workers

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     She’s studying computer engineering at UNM on a student visa. Her husband, who has graduated, is working in IT until his student visa runs out, and then he’ll return to school and try to juggle work and studies to stay in the United States. Going home is not an option because there is nothing for them in their small, impoverished country.

      “All my friends are here or in Canada or Australia,” he says.

     Both would be hired in a heartbeat if our immigration system met today’s needs. This young couple and thousands like them are at the center of the recent, much publicized kerfuffle between the president-elect’s new friends in Silicon Valley and his MAGA followers. Companies, especially tech companies, need these highly trained employees, and they’re up against a smaller American workforce and an immigration system that’s frozen in time.

     Specifically, Elon Musk and the tech giants want more H-1B visas. This is a short-term visa typically extended to foreigners in science and engineering.

      Why do we need them? If you look inside our engineering schools in New Mexico and nationwide you will find a great many people from Asia, India and the Middle East. Americans, not so much.      Trump appointee Vivek Ramaswamy blames this on a culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence” and celebrates “the jock over the valedictorian.”

     That’s not the case. In the 1990s, when my job at UNM was to publicize the engineering school, American students with a head for numbers were drifting away from engineering in favor of business school, which they found more exciting. Foreign students still consider engineering a good profession, and the universities are happy to have them. But once they graduate, they want to stay here, and we need them.

     The president-elect, who temporarily suspended the H-1B program during his first term, may have a change of heart since tech honchos befriended him during his recent campaign. Lately he appointed venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, a friend of Elon Musk, as a senior policy adviser, and Krishnan recommended ending certain country caps for green cards, H-1Bs and other skilled immigration programs. Trump’s far right base opposes any new immigrants, educated or not.

     Long before Musk and Ramaswamy joined the Trump inner circle, companies of all kinds were complaining that they couldn’t get the specialized workers they need because of limits on the H-1B program. One of their public voices has been the conservative-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which wrote in 2022 that a major obstacle was “the antiquated, arbitrary quotas on the employment-based visa options.” Quotas for green cards and temporary worker visas were set in 1990. Since then the size of the U.S. economy has more than quadrupled while visa numbers approved by Congress have hardly budged.

     “These 30-year-old visa caps are woefully insufficient to meet the needs of the American economy today,” the organization wrote. In fiscal 2023, just one in six applicants for an H-1B visa was approved. The program reaches its quotas in weeks, and backlogs exceeded 1.8 million.

     The U.S. Chamber concluded that because companies can’t hire the talent they need, they can’t grow. That hurts existing employees. And the situation is only growing worse.

     “When the federal government will only allow American businesses to meet approximately 11% of their high-skilled workforce needs, it is long past time for Congress to update our immigration laws to reflect the needs of today’s economy,” the chamber said.

     After covering business for many years, I can tell you that business people are practical, focused and not usually given to ideological rhetoric. In the current row, my money is on them. Their donations to the inauguration fund, their pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago all mean access, and it’s aroused some suspicion. But it may be that these business execs finally get the ball rolling on immigration reform when many others have failed.