Dreamland

Note: With the continuing conversation in America about immigration, legal and otherwise, the following piece is timely. It was published in the Summer 2013 edition of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, the quarterly magazine sent to members of the National Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi.

Helping Newcomers Work Their Way In

By John T. Harding

The American welcome mat remains in place for newcomers who can create jobs and fill specialized positions. Worldwide competition for business investors and skilled professionals prompted the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) last November to launch Entrepreneur Pathways, an online resource for these strivers to secure visas. The web portal was built by Entrepreneurs in Residence, a think tank formed in October 2011 of startup experts from the private sector and USCIS authorities. Both initiatives reinforce ongoing efforts to bolster the U.S. economy through the labor force by smoothing the entry process for highly qualified foreigners.

The payoff is potentially great for these permanent workers and for the market sector. “Approximately 140,000 immigrant visas are available each fiscal year for aliens (and their spouses and children) who seek to immigrate based on their job skills,” the USCIS website explains. One of the five visa categories is for “persons of extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics; outstanding professors or researchers; and multinational executives and managers.” Another is for those “who invest $1 million or $500,000 (if the investment is made in a targeted employment area) in a new commercial enterprise that employs at least 10 full-time U.S. workers.”

Evidence demonstrates that ventures like these in the American Dream improve the national bottom line. For instance, immigrants founded 25 percent of the highest-growth companies in the U.S., such as Google, eBay, and Intel, and cumulatively these outfits employ approximately 220,000 people stateside, write Felicia Escobar and Doug Rand in “A New Front Door for Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” posted on the White House blog last November, to publicize Entrepreneur Pathways. And topnotch newcomers fill critical vacancies across the board, especially in science, technology, engineering and math, and in some cases require increasing the staff to assist them, the Immigration Policy Center summarizes in “The U.S. Economy Still Needs Highly Skilled Foreign Workers,” a March 2011 document that supports the federal H-1B visa program allowing the temporary hiring of “nonimmigrant aliens” of exceptional capability.

Indeed, immigrants are 30 percent more likely to open a U.S. business than non-immigrants. And newcomers total 33 percent of engineers, 27 percent of mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists, and 24 percent of physical scientists, despite comprising only 16 percent of overall residents with a bachelor’s degree or more. These findings come from Jason Furman and Danielle Gray’s compilation, “Ten Ways Immigrants Help Build and Strengthen Our Economy,” posted on the White House blog last July.

Despite widespread concern that immigrants — legal and otherwise — take jobs away from American citizens, the reality is more complicated. As with other fields, supply and demand factor into things. And many Americans refuse menial jobs while newcomers are eager for work of any kind. Also, “Of the 1.1 million green cards issued in a typical year, the United States awards 85 percent to family and humanitarian immigrants and only 15 percent to employment-based, highly skilled immigrants. Of these 15 percent, half go to the workers’ spouses and children,” said Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas executive Pia M. Orrenius in “Immigration Reform and U.S. Economic Performance,” published by the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations in March 2011. It’s worth mentioning that for those holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent for citizens and 5.7 percent for immigrants, according to “Amnesty and the U.S. Labor Market,” a paper issued last December by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies, which cited U.S. Census Bureau data for the third quarter 2012.

Also, “research indicates that illegal immigrant workers are overwhelmingly those with relatively little education,” said Steven A. Camarota, director of research at this center. “While it would be a mistake to think that every job taken by an illegal immigrant is a job lost by a native,” Camarota wrote in the paper,  his analysis “make[s] clear that Americans with relatively little education have been hit hard” by the recession.

What’s more, the federal program to issue green cards to business investors or skilled workers stipulates that there are “insufficient available, qualified, and willing U.S. workers to fill the position being offered at the prevailing wage,” and that “hiring a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers,” details the USCIS website.

So for those with money and skills, Lady Liberty’s lamp guiding the way to opportunity still burns brightly through the fuel of government assistance. In northern Vermont, for example, reported Katharine Q. Seelye for The New York Times last December, the Jay Peak ski resort is adding a biomedical research firm and window manufacturing plant, plus a hotel and conference center and sundry other area facilities ranging from an indoor water park to a hockey arena to condominiums. Financing in part comes from the federal program that offers permanent residency to newcomers who invest in a significant project like this one. Total cost of the expansion: $865 million. Direct and indirect jobs to be created: 10,000. Foreign investors: 550 from 60 countries so far.

The article also included this fact: the federal government issued 802 of these visas in 2006 and 7,818 in 2012.