Opinion: U.S. visa reforms would boost state’s economy, not just tech
Issuing visas first to employers offering the highest wages could help smaller companies compete for foreign talent.
Apart from our first names, I don’t have much in common with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. But we do agree that the H-1B visa program — which lets companies employ foreign workers in tech and other specialized jobs — is broken.
It remains to be seen if Ramaswamy will revive his call to “gut” the program. My advice? He’d be wise not to. The program needs reform, of course, but doing away with it could have devastating consequences for the business sectors that rely on it.
The H-1B program can provide a pathway to success for the workers who come to the U.S. on the visa. I should know — a similar program changed the trajectory of my life. I’ve been able to create hundreds of jobs in the decades since.
Like so many government programs, the H-1B visa is well-intended but flawed in its current form. The reforms most urgently needed would be to increase the number of visas allocated each year and to prioritize employers offering the highest wages.
Currently, the annual cap is set at 65,000 visas, with an additional 20,000 slots allocated for workers with graduate degrees from American universities. That’s significantly down from the cap set in the early 2000s of 195,000 annually. According to Vox, for fiscal year 2023, only 26% of 483,000 applications — more than double the 201,000 petitions submitted for 2020 — were chosen for processing.
If there is no political will to increase the overall number of visas, we should consider raising the cap for those who have completed graduate degrees from American universities. Despite heavy investment in STEM programs in higher education, many companies claim they struggle to meet their hiring needs, especially in computer-related specialties. As a result, trained graduates with engineering and programming experience are in high demand.
Nearly 70% of applications in 2020 were for computer-related jobs with an average annual salary of $101,000, according to the Department of Homeland Security. By increasing the number of graduate visas, we could build the next generation of job creators and entrepreneurs.
But increasing the number of visas alone won’t solve the problem if corporate giants stay the course. If you look at the top companies sponsoring H-1B visas in 2023, it’s a virtual who’s who of Big Tech. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Meta employs so many H-1B workers that it has declared itself an “H-1B dependent” firm in government filings for years because more than 15% of its total U.S. workforce is H-1B workers.
The problem is clear, the policy institute noted, “Visa use is and has been highly concentrated among a small number of employers.” In other words, Big Tech is hoovering up all the talent.
Bipartisan support exists for reforms. Sens. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, proposed a change to the program that would ensure that visas are first issued to employers offering the highest wages before being allocated to other petitioners. This may give smaller companies and startups a better chance at bringing much-needed foreign talent to the U.S.
The startup studio I co-founded is currently sponsoring dozens of H-1B visa workers, but we would like to bring in more if the playing field was fairer. More broadly, smaller, up-and-coming companies around the country would greatly benefit from access to such talent. That’s why it’s truly in the tech community’s — and the American economy’s — interest to push for such commonsense reforms.
Vivek Vaidya is the founding general partner of the startup studio super{set} and former CTO for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He wrote this commentary for CalMatters.