Remove the H1B Visa Cap


Technology is an essential component on the lifecycle of all products and services. The ‘technology component’ plays an ever-increasing role on the quality, price, speed to market and overall competitiveness of anything offered.

Technology workers make it possible. The availability, quality and cost of those workers have a direct impact on the competiveness of governments, companies, products, services and (ultimately) whole economies and countries.

Our system of quotas on the number of H1B visas granted to high tech workers is a godsend to our competition, and a hindrance to our ability to compete and win. Out system allows for few engineers to come and train, only to deny them the right to renew their visas and stay. They leave, join other companies and governments, and compete against us, with the tools we taught them.

The necessity to increase our technology advances is heralded by all presidential contenders, but this will not happen without courageous and deliberate action by Congress and the President. The beginning is to dramatically expand, or eliminate, limits on the number of qualified technology workers admitted into the Country.

Getting down to business, this is what happens: when a company needs to improve their services or products (which is ‘always’ if they want to remain competitive, make better products or reduce costs), they will look for technology workers to do it. They are buyers of technology. If the sellers (the workers) are not available, or are too expensive locally (limited supply), the company will either postpone or eliminate new development, or offshore it.

Should this company postpone development of their services or products, they fall behind and cannot compete globally. Eventually, imports will even affect their domestic market. Under this scenario, we lose.

Should this company offshore development, we lose the opportunity to ‘on-the-job-train’ new workers, increase our technology capital, the tax revenue of salaries not paid to American workers and the income not spent in our economy.

As long as there is a buyer, there is a seller. When we need technology, we will buy it wherever it is. If we find it here, the technology and money stays here. If we buy it overseas, they both go to enrich another country. If we do not buy it, we lose the market to other companies that have readily cheap technology available to them.

We cannot ignore the technology component in all we do, enjoy and buy. Technology does not just ‘happens’, it requires workers. Highly skilled and intelligent engineers from the world over are motivated to come and join our communities and our economy, bringing with them millions of dollars worth of education. Other countries fight for them while we keep them out. This does not make sense; we should open the doors to them, as they will enrich our society in many ways.