Around 150 high-skilled Indian-American professionals, including scientists, engineers and doctors, converged in Washington DC June 7-8, to meet with the nation's lawmakers on Capitol Hill to advocate fixing the long green-card backlogs and the urgent need for comprehensive immigration reform.
The intent of this wide-ranging two-day advocacy event, organized by national grassroots organization Immigration Voice, was to highlight the plight of about a million high- skilled professionals and their families who are unable to obtain permanent residence or a green card due to a broken immigration system.
Immigration Voice lists out the important reasons for the urgent need for legal immigration reform for highly skilled technology/science workers.
Impact on economy
Acclaimed researchers and economist have found that the flawed immigration system has created an application backlog of over a million skilled workers because the system takes anywhere between six to 25 years to grant green cards. This backlog has started causing a sizeable "reverse brain-drain" of talent from the United States to other countries and has already started impacting U.S. technological competitiveness. This fact is even more significant considering that:
• Immigrants were the CEOs or lead technologists in one of every four tech and engineering companies started in the United States from 1995 to 2005 and in 52 percent of Silicon Valley startups.
• Immigrant-founded companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006.
Impact on employers
The American Society of Engineering Education reports that in 2006, 40 percent of engineering masters and 62 percent of engineering doctoral degrees in the United States were awarded to foreign nationals. Not fixing the broken immigration system makes it extremely difficult for American companies to hire from this huge pool of talent.
Impact on American innovation
The stagnation of the legal immigration system for more than a decade, without any action from Congress, is seriously eroding the drive to innovate.
These large numbers of about a million highly skilled professionals are forcibly distracted from contributing to innovation and new technologies by a seemingly never-ending immigration process and a stagnant application queue that is currently backlogged with hundreds of thousands of employment-based immigrant applications. In addition, such a system prevents the workers from pursuing promotions and career growth for the long time period it takes to process their applications.
Impact on families
The emotional trauma and psychological impact on the families of high-skilled workers cannot be stressed enough. Despite having the required employer support and qualifications, high-skilled workers and their families have to wait for years in queue to obtain permanent residence.
These families own homes in the United States, their children attend schools here and they are all active members of their respective communities all over the country. And yet, they continue to be forced to wait for many years to become permanent residents or green card holders.
The discriminatory per-country limits that aspiring immigrants from India, China, Mexico or Philippines are subject to, further exacerbates an already serious backlog problem.
