Issue Summary
The business visa system today is in desperate need of reform. A combination of processing delays, backlogs in the EB visa (green card) categories, and overly restrictive caps on temporary visas, such as the H-1B, pose a serious and ongoing obstacle for high tech companies battling to stay competitive in a global market. Repeatedly the U.S. has run out of H-1B visas long before the end of the fiscal year, on occasion reaching the cap before the fiscal year even gets underway. Under current law the H-1B visa program, which was designed to provide U.S. employers access to top worldwide talent, is capped at 65,000 visas per year. In 2004, Congress created an exemption for 20,000 foreign nationals earning advanced degrees from U.S. universities. Both of these visa pools, however, have proved inadequate, regularly leaving companies without access to new hires for periods of a year or longer.
Compounding this problem, employees waiting for their green cards are being held up in some cases for up to five years. While stuck in this limbo their temporary visas could expire forcing them to cease their employment and leave the country. This is bad for business, bad for innovation, and ultimately bad for U.S. competitiveness. Reforms must be put in place that can assure U.S. companies continued access to highly educated foreign professionals.
Sun's Position
- From its earliest days as an innovative start-up company to its current position as a leading provider of scalable network computing systems and solutions that power some of the world's most important markets, Sun Microsystems has always benefited from the contributions of highly educated foreign professionals.
- Now action is needed to fix both the temporary (H-1B) and the permanent (green card) systems that we rely upon to help fuel our innovation and growth. If either end of that pipeline is broken, it interferes with our ability to hire and retain critical employees.
- H-1B workers do not take jobs from Americans. In fact, they are job creators. Two of Sun's four original founders, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vinod Khosla, are foreign nationals. Other prominent Sun employees such as James Gosling, the inventor of the Java programming platform, and Anant Agrawal, who led the development of the SPARC microprocessor, are also foreign nationals. Each of these talented individuals is responsible for the creation of thousands of American jobs and millions of dollars in revenues.
- The majority of H-1B's Sun hires are students graduating from U.S. colleges and universities. Over 50% of the graduates from US schools with a Masters degree or above in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math) are foreign students. This is our hiring pool.
- It makes no sense to invest in the education and training of highly skilled individuals only to send them back to another country to compete against us.... and they will compete against us.
- Global competition is fierce! We need every bright mind we can get to stay on top.
- This is about global competitiveness. America benefits from the contributions of highly educated foreign nationals.
- FY '07 marks the eighth time in the last ten years that the H-1B visa cap has been reached before the end of the fiscal year, and the third consecutive year the cap has been reached prior to the beginning of the new fiscal year. Neither Sun, nor any successful U.S. company, can afford to go year after year without access to top worldwide talent.
- If we cannot hire here, we are going to have to hire abroad. Sun's investments toward training and education for American workers will continue aggressively, but we cannot put our business on hold while we wait for those longer term investments to meet our immediate needs.
- H-1B workers make up a small percentage of our total workforce (under 5%), but they fill critical roles.
Recommendations
We support the provisions from the "SKIL Bill" (S. 2691; H.R. 5744) which were also included in the Senate's version of comprehensive immigration reform. These prudent reforms would:
- Create a market-based cap for H-1B visas, and increase their numbers;
- Exempt students with an advanced degree in a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) field from the H-1B cap;
- Increase EB (green card) levels and allow unused visas to benefit oversubscribed categories;
- Exempt STEM degree holders and their dependents from the EB cap;
- Create a new streamlined path to green card status (new F-4 visa) for foreign students pursuing advanced degrees in a STEM field.
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