Gordon Hanson's Research On Highly Skilled Immigrants Referenced
Give us your engineers, yearning to innovate
11/01/2011
Daniel Griswold,
The Washington Times
After years of legislative stalemate on immigration reform, Congress may be ready to enact a modest but important change that will loosen self-defeating restrictions on the hiring of highly skilled foreign-born workers.
Called the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (House Resolution 3012), the bill would relax the quota system on high-tech visas so U.S. companies could hire the best-qualified foreign-born scientists and engineers regardless of their country of origin. It would be a rare step in the right direction for U.S. immigration policy.
Under current law, no more than 7 percent of the 140,000 annual permanent “green card” employment visas can be awarded to workers from any one country. That arbitrarily excludes qualified potential immigrants from China and India, each with more than 1 billion residents and thriving technology sectors. This makes no sense.
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Gordon Hanson is director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. Prior to joining UCSD in 2001, he was on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan (1998-2001) and at the University of Texas (1992-1998).
