Opinion

Immigration reform can jumpstart economy

Font Size:

Jeffrey is a talented electrical engineering PhD student at CalTech. He already holds three patents. One of his inventions may cure glaucoma. It is a tiny electrical device that can be implanted behind the human eyeball. It works automatically, can wirelessly interact with medical software, and doesn’t require a battery. After graduation, Jeffrey plans on starting his own company to produce it and help the roughly four million Americans who suffer from glaucoma.

Sounds like the beginning of a typical American success story. But Jeffrey’s story is not as uplifting as it seems. That’s because the government might kick him out of the country. He is not a criminal; Jeffrey Lin’s only offense is that he is from Taiwan.

Jeffrey and hundreds of thousands of foreign students in similar situations will create many start-up firms, create jobs, and improve technology one way or another. They just might not do so in the United States. Our immigration laws may well force Jeffrey, his ideas, and his talent back to Taiwan or to another welcoming country like Canada.

Fortunately, reform might be just around the corner. A bill called the STAPLE Act is currently winding its way through Congress. It would remove the numerical cap on H-1B visas. It would also automatically approve employer-sponsored green cards for foreign PhD students who graduate from American universities in the sciences, technology, engineering, or mathematics (what education wonks call the STEM fields).

H-1B visas are employer-sponsored visas for highly skilled workers in specialty occupations. They run for three years and can be renewed once. Currently, there are only 20,000 H-1B spots for foreigners graduating from American universities. Actual demand is far higher. The STAPLE Act essentially raises the cap by exempting some petitioners from it.

The STAPLE act is hardly a comprehensive reform. But it would help a lot of people like Jeffrey who came to the U.S. for its top-notch education system, and would like to stay because of its relatively excellent entrepreneurial environment. As the U.S. economy struggles to recover, it could use as many Jeffrey Lins as it can get.

Under the current system, Jeffrey has a chance of eventually getting a green card. But it will probably take at least six years. And it could take many more after his graduation. Until then, he will live a life of uncertainty dominated by filling out forms for the federal government and enduring restrictions on where he can work and what he can do.

Starting a business under such scrutiny is out of the question. Legal immigrants routinely tell stories of accidentally making errors on immigration forms and then having to begin the process all over again. Why should Jeffrey bother to raise capital or hire workers for his company when he might be forced to drop it if he is deported? Why would he buy a home or start a family? America is the land of entrepreneurs. Yet this is how the law treats many of those entrepreneurs.

Nationwide, immigrants like Jeffrey earn well over half of all engineering PhDs. Forty percent of PhD scientists working in the U.S. and a third of Silicon Valley’s scientists and engineers are foreign born. They invent and create economic opportunities for themselves and Americans.

Jeffrey’s three patents are an enormous achievement. But he is hardly unique. A quarter of international patents filed from the U.S. in 2006 named a non-U.S. citizen working in the U.S. as the inventor or co-inventor. Immigrants are responsible for an outsized portion of today’s rapid technological advancements.

Technological development, entrepreneurship, and scientific discovery all suffer when highly skilled foreigners are forced to leave. America is one of the best places in the world to conduct scientific research. That is why so many Americans, many of them immigrants, win Nobel Prizes every year. One-quarter of the Americans who have won Nobel Prizes since 1901 (when Noble Prizes were first awarded) have been immigrants, even though immigrants comprise just one-eighth of the U.S. population.

America is a land of opportunity where immigrants can work hard and fulfill their dreams — when the law lets them. Without reforms like the ones in the STAPLE Act, immigrants like Jeffrey Lin will be barred from fulfilling their dreams. America would be a poorer country for that — something to think about in these tough economic times.

Ryan Young is a Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Alex Nowrasteh is a Policy Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel