I strongly recommend the front page story in the NYT today about how US immigration policy is making it next to impossible for US technology companies to hire the top technical talent from abroad. The poster child is Sanjay Mavinkurve, a Harvard grad in CS who has already demonstrated himself to be a top engineer at the age of 28. He works for Google — out of Canada, since he can’t get a green card and so his wife can’t work here.

I have had many, many students from abroad who just want to be Americans. They have contributed far more jobs to the US economy than they have consumed themselves. The counter-argument — that there are unemployed US engineers who should be hired instead — is absurd. Of course an average US engineer should be hired over an average foreign engineer, but we are talking about the people who will drive the US economy in the future. America has the potential to keep doing just what it has always done, bring in the top talent from abroad and make them its own. Without them, we will stagnate in our jingoistic righteousness and wind up with a second-rate economy.

I know Lou Dobbs doesn’t agree ‚Ķ

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under The role of government—laws and regulations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.