Over the course of our country's history, foreign-born innovators have made enormous contributions to our national prosperity. That much is indisputable. Companies like Google, Intel, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and eBay have been founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs. As the global competition for talent grows more intense, we should take care to ensure that our immigration policies allow these kinds of contributions to continue. We need these people innovating, researching, opening businesses, and creating jobs here in the United States, rather than in China or India.
For that reason, Representative Michael McCaul and I recently introduced the New American Innovators Act. Our legislation is very simple: it would exempt anyone receiving a Ph.D. from an American university from numerical immigration limits. Under our bill, these talented individuals would no longer have to wait for years on end before qualifying for a green card.
We understand that the New American Innovators Act is not a comprehensive solution to the problems plaguing our high-skill immigration system. However, we do feel that our bill, and others like it, can help to illuminate the most compelling reasons for opening our borders to the most talented, highly educated individuals in the world, regardless of their country of origin.
Too often, discussions regarding our high-skill immigration policy get bogged down in a debate over the relative quality of the American workforce. I am not diminishing the importance of that debate; in fact, it is critical to our national future. But its outcome should not be the sole determinant of our high-skill immigration policy.
Well-known Stanford economist Paul Romer has discussed a "prospector theory" of high-skill immigration. As Mr. Romer describes it, "the more people you have prospecting, the more you will be stumbling on rich veins of gold."
American universities regularly graduate American students of the highest quality, and our economy has reaped the benefits for decades. But American universities also produce foreign graduates of equally high quality. Our economy has benefited from their talents as well. In fact, between 1995 and 2005 one quarter of all start-up engineering and technology firms in the United States had at least one foreign-born founder. By 2005, these companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
The individuals we are targeting with our legislation are the best of the best. A Ph.D. from an American university is the gold standard in higher education. These individuals are not going to take jobs from Americans, they are going to create jobs for Americans, as foreign-born innovators have done for years. How much poorer would we be as a country if people like Andy Grove, who received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and whose vision and talent made Intel the company that it is today, had been forced to leave the country upon completing their studies?
There is yet another reason we should be doing everything we can to keep these students in the United States: the American people subsidized their educations. Many of the foreign-born graduates of our schools studied at universities which receive significant public funding.
The fact is that we've invested a lot of resources over the years into building a higher education system that is the envy of the entire world, and because it is the envy of the entire world it attracts the best and the brightest students from around the world. That being the case, we should want to make it as easy as possible for those students who come out the other side of our higher education system with the most skills to stay. We should want them to become Americans.
In fact, it is a great testament to the singular level of opportunity available in the United States that so many of these foreign-born innovators have navigated our byzantine immigration system so that they can stay. But we cannot expect them to continue doing so indefinitely.
Unfortunately, our current immigration system practically begs them to go to our global economic competitors. It's like Microsoft spending years training a young employee, bringing them along at great effort and expense and then, just when that employee is ready to start paying dividends to the company, forcing them out the door to work for their competitor. That approach wouldn't make sense in the business world, and it doesn't work as national policy either.
We currently have the most talented workforce in the world, but we need to make sure that our education and immigration systems are working in concert to maintain and expand on that advantage. Passing the New American Innovators Act would mean more jobs, higher economic growth, and a better standard of living for all Americans.
Loading comments… 
Of course foreigners have been a major asset to our country. But who would argue (other than CEOs looking for cheap labor) for unrestrict
Wages in high tech fields have been falling the last ten years (even for PhDs), yet the law-makers continue to flood the market with cheap workers.
Moderate immigratio
Funny, I am American and I have a PhD in microbiolo
What do you think I tell people when they ask about a career in science? "Well, I hope you like going to college for 9 years, coming out with $40k in debt and making an embarrassi
So yeah get all the PhDs you can in this country then ask yourself why you have to even do that. Ask yourself why with 300,000,00
How much did Microsoft, Google, and eBay donate to your re-electio
Do you have any data to support this assertion? Saying that such programs depress wages as a whole is debatable but to allege that a MAJORITY of beneficiar
I have been involved in many hiring decisions in my company and in previous companies and let me tell you how it works. We look at all the resumes we have and many of them have PhDs. We invite the candidates who have the most impressive (and best suited) resumes and grill them for an entire day. Rightly or wrongly, we don't care if they are American-b
If you look at the typical physics or electrical engineerin
As it is most of them who want to stay in the states, simply get a job with a high tech company who is willing to sponsor their green card applicatio
The scandal that Rep Kennedy would be better off addressing is, "Why can't American primary and secondary students compete with foreign born students in the fields of math and science? Why is it that the science and math programs at American Universiti
So while university IT programs go begging,in
But instead, you propose to add some speculativ
Right now, America is suffering the same technology struggle that was the signature of the Soviet Union. If other jobs pay just as much and are easier to qualify for, why do the hard stuff? This is a problem created by socialism for corporatio
As a founder at Symantec and Visicorp and a staff engineer at Apple, I have seen the field born, grow and die, in my lifetime. I know whereof I speak.
It's not that simple. In the short term laptops, ipods, cellphones
Kennedy's legislatio
"A Ph.D. from an American university is the gold standard in higher education.
American business schools have no clue. All they know how to do is lower the cost of labor.
Extrapolat
This is your challenge as a lawmaker, Rep. Kennedy. Do something about it.
If went by some to these reactions, we may not be the world power we are today.
Many of the principal scientists involved in the Manhattan Project and the building of the atomic bomb were foreign-bo
How about Albert Einstein, I'm sure he was preventing some American from having a job too.
Many consumer items are cheaper because of globalizat
Wages have deteriorat
unless these phD's are in positions to really start up companies (have the funding and management skills), they are just another H1B visa applicant.
I myself paid dearly to be retrained in IT in the late 90's, being told, 'In this field there will always be employment
When politician
National healthcare would go along way toward making this country competitiv
CEO's can find any number of excuses to deny Americans jobs; while they continue to get stock options and the golden parachute when their management kills the corporatio
I agree with other posters who have said there are far more important issues than whether a phD can immediatel
Ummm...no you don't.
I'd guess not.