The costly flaws in America's high-skilled immigration policy
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Many of the world's best and brightest want to work in the United States. But U.S. immigration policy does a bad job of enabling them to do so — undermining the nation's economic growth, a paper out Wednesday morning argues.
Why it matters: Top engineering, research, and entrepreneurial talent generate outsize economic gains. But the structure of visa programs that allow new workers in isn't optimized to select for that talent, researchers argue, so potential gains in productivity and growth are lost.
- There is "a grave mismatch between the scale of America's national ambitions for technological leadership and the way it governs high-skilled immigration, its single most reliable comparative advantage," wrote Jeremy Neufeld in a paper from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.
- The paper, an earlier version of which was presented this summer to economic policy and business elites at the group's annual meeting, is part of a forthcoming volume on "Advancing America's Prosperity."
State of play: The H-1B visa program for overseas talent works through a lottery system. Its structure thus incentivizes employers to play a numbers game of seeking a large amount of potential immigrant workers, hoping some win that lottery.
- But this works against the idea of only seeking visas for the workers who bring unique value to the table.
- Neufeld estimated that replacing the current lottery system with one that allocates visas based on compensation, even keeping the current level of slots, would increase the economic benefit of the H-1B program by 88% over a decade.
What they're saying: "There's 300,000-plus people applying, and we're handing out visas at random," Neufeld, director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, tells Axios. "That seems like an insane way to be picking who's going to be on Team America."
- "I think one thing that the Trump administration is right about in their critique of some of these programs is that very little is currently done to prioritize the people who are going to be making the largest economic contributions."
Of note: The administration has drastically increased the application fee for an H-1B visa to $100,000, which could help ensure companies only use the visas for the most valuable workers.
- Neufeld describes it as a "very kludgy fix," arguing for a more carefully calibrated mix of policies.
Disclosure: Neil is a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He attends its meetings in his capacity as a journalist.
