The H-1B visa reset will crush America’s college pipeline

By Andy Mukherjee

Before the ink is dry on his chaotic plan to charge employers a fat fee for hiring foreigners, President Donald Trump may end up choking off the very pipeline through which young overseas students trickle into the American job market: College education.

Last week’s hastily imposed Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers opened a new front in Washington’s increasingly ugly trade spat with New Delhi. Indian techies and doctors, who hold more than 70% of the existing visas under this category, read the move as an eviction notice from their careers and lives in the US. Or at least that’s how Trump’s proclamation was received, until the White House clarified that a one-time $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would only apply to employers of new applicants — and doctors may be exempt.

That was last week. A separate proposal, announced Tuesday, seeks to overhaul the H-1B lottery itself by introducing a wage-based rule into what is currently a random process. The rejig goes way beyond targeting India, or for that matter, the $100,000 fee. Once implemented, it would dim the appeal of the F-1 student visa — a far more crucial source of America’s long-term competitiveness than the 85,000-a-year jobs quota. Although damaging the US university system isn’t the intended goal, that would be the unfortunate result. 

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s moving to a weighted selection process that would “favor the allocation of H-1B visas to higher skilled and higher paid aliens.” So far, so good. But with demand for these visas exceeding supply each year for more than a decade, the catch lies in the complex manner in which the quota will be distributed. Currently, most of the approvals go to California because tech-industry employers, such as Amazon.com Inc. and India’s Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., the largest Indian outsourcing firm, seek them aggressively.

Silicon Valley’s dominance might continue even under the new rules, as would the rampant gaming of the H-1B system by outsourcing firms. However, fresh, foreign-born STEM graduates may lose access to the one US talent market where their education and skills are the most valued.  

Until now, once they got a job offer and it was time to switch their status from F-1 to H-1B, computer-science graduates had the same chance of getting selected as a mid-career techie from India. Now, they will face an inbuilt bias against their youth. To even put their hat in the ring for a software-development H-1B, their prospective employer will need to offer them a minimum salary of $136,000 in San Francisco county. After they secure this offer, they will face a 4:1 disadvantage in the visa sweepstakes against experienced immigrants coming in to work on artificial intelligence projects at an annual salary of $214,000-plus.

Naturally, new computer-science graduates will get elbowed out of the Bay Area, or chased out of the US entirely. That’s because the revamped lottery would prefer a foreign-born landscape architect at $97,000, the top pay for the profession in Las Vegas. To enjoy the same odds, the freshly minted software developer, if she isn’t an American citizen or permanent resident, will need a Vegas job paying $164,000, or a $139,000 offer from Des Moines. (Geography as well as occupation will matter under the plan. The calculator that spews out the numbers is available here.)

The US does need aesthetically pleasing golf courses and competitively priced nail salons, but it also must create jobs for Americans at the cutting edge of technology. That’s the promise that each young computer scientist implicitly makes to the host society when H-1B allows them to start a career as an executive, startup founder, or researcher. This contract is now broken. Since most international students at four-year US undergraduate programs self-finance their education, the lure of an expensive American science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degree would plummet under the new rules.

That would be a shame. Every fifth person pursuing a STEM career in the US is foreign-born. The talent pool of more than 7 million is drawn from around the world, but principally from five countries: Mexico, India, China, the Philippines and Vietnam. Not all may have attended a US university on an F-1 visa, but many have.

This will change. The nativist right-wing view in the US supports doing away with practical training, which is how immigrant students get to stay on after finishing their coursework and look for a job. New cohorts will be discouraged, while existing students will start weighing rival offers. Germany’s ambassador in India has already taken to social media with a sales pitch. “Our migration policy works a bit like a German car,” he says. “It is reliable, it is modern, it is predictable.” Do you think parents in Mumbai or New Delhi, already fearful about US immigration raids, won’t relay this message to their children at Brown or Berkeley?

The world’s faith in the dollar already appears to be cracking under the weight of the trade war. After the greenback, if there’s another piece of paper that’s keeping the US economy in pole position, then it’s the F-1 visa, acting as a pathway to H-1B, permanent residency, and eventually citizenship. The Trump administration mustn’t devalue it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.