(Photo: Eros Hoagland for The New York Times)

In a continuing series on immigration, Room for Debate this week examines the issue of skilled foreign-born workers, many of whom are here on temporary guest worker visas. An article that will appear over the weekend will explore this topic.

For the high-tech industries, particularly, foreign-born workers on temporary H-1B visas are an important labor pool. Many of these workers arrived in the United States as students and stay on through the H-1B program. Many also go on to become permanent residents and founders of startup firms. But there is longstanding criticism among some labor groups that workers on such visas suppress engineering salaries and actually make it easier for employers to move more jobs to low-cost countries like India.

We’ve asked several experts how immigration policy affects high-skilled workers and the industries that rely on them. Please join the discussion in the comments section here.

Our Real Problem Is the Brain Drain

Vivek Wadhwa is an executive in residence for the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a senior research associate in the labor and work-life program at Harvard Law School.

The debates about H-1B visas and legislation restricting firms getting federal bailouts from hiring foreign students are badly out of touch with the new global reality. The U.S. is no longer the only land of opportunity. Highly skilled foreign-born workers are leaving the country in droves.

Research at Duke, Berkeley, New York University and Harvard has shown that skilled immigrants have fueled our tech boom. Over half of Silicon Valley tech start-ups and a quarter of those nationwide were founded by immigrants from 1995-2005. In 2005 alone, these companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers — a number greater than the number of H-1B workers in the tech industries over the prior 10 years combined. Foreign nationals in the U.S. contributed to 25.6 percent of our global patents in 2006.

But because of shortsighted immigration policies, we increased the numbers of temporary H-1B visas over the years, but not permanent resident visas. So we have about 500,000 engineers, scientists, doctors and other professionals working for American companies who are stuck in “immigration limbo.”

With thousands of workers returning to India and China, the next Google or Cisco may be founded overseas.

While they wait to become permanent residents, they can’t change jobs without losing their position in line or even accept a promotion. Their visas don’t allow their spouses to work or obtain Social-Security numbers which are needed for things like driver’s licenses. So they live like second-class citizens.

Add to this the isolation and loneliness which most immigrants feel when they come to a new land and the burgeoning economies of India and China, and you have the perfect storm for diminishing U.S. competitiveness. Thousands are returning home every month.

Our survey of 1,203 returnees to India and China revealed that they were doing better back home. Returnees moved up the organization chart and found better professional opportunities. They enjoy being close to parents and friends. They are making less money but enjoy a better quality of life. The majority want to start a company and think that their home countries are more fertile.

We also surveyed 1,224 foreign students in the U.S. and learned that they were thinking much like the returnees. Only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students want to stay permanently. (In the past, most Indian and Chinese Ph.D.s in science and engineering ended up making the U.S. their home.)

This is even most troubling when you consider that 47 percent of all U.S. science and engineering workers with doctorates are immigrants as were 67 percent of the additions to the U.S. science and engineering work force between 1995 to 2006. And roughly 60 percent of engineering Ph.D. students and 40 percent of master’s students are foreign nationals.

This is great for India and China. China will be able to develop innovative and competitive products. India will be able to offer better and cheaper outsourcing services. Both countries will see thousands of new companies being started — one or two of which may be the next Google or Cisco. By encouraging this exodus, we won’t create new opportunities for Americans, but only more unemployment.

Suppressing Wages With Younger Workers

Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis.

Numerous studies, including those conducted by the National Research Council and the General Accounting Office, show that foreign workers holding H-1B work visas are often paid less than comparable Americans.

Underpayment of H-1Bs is usually in full compliance with the law, with employers exploiting loopholes; it’s not mainly a fraud problem. Abuse of foreign worker programs pervades the industry, including large,

mainstream firms.

We should welcome the world’s “best and brightest,” but H-1B visa workers aren’t in that league.

This is also true with foreign students graduating from U.S. universities, who are hired as H-1B workers. A 1989 National Science Foundation position paper, written when Congress was debating creation of the H-1B program, actually advocated using the program to hold down Ph.D. salaries by flooding the job market with foreign students. The N.S.F. also forecast, correctly, that stagnant salaries would push domestic students away from Ph.D. study.

A core problem with the H-1B program is its impact on older U.S. workers. The median age of H-1B workers is 27, and since younger workers are cheaper, employers use H-1B to avoid hiring older (i.e. over age 35) U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Human resources departments routinely exclude the applications of older workers on the grounds that the applicants have experience beyond the range stated in the job ad. Proposals to grant green cards in lieu of H-1B visas are thus misguided, as they would still swell the young labor pool.

The hiring managers have a “gotcha” for the younger applicants too, rejecting them as lacking job experience in some special (but quickly learnable) skill.

The industry lobbyists note that 50 percent of Silicon Valley startups have been founded by immigrants. But since immigrants make up half of Silicon Valley engineers, the lobbyists’ figure merely shows that entrepreneurship rates of immigrants and natives are the same. There is no evidence that the displacement of American workers has produced a net increase in startups.

The world’s “best and brightest” should be welcomed, but most H-1B workers are not in that league. Meanwhile, many of our own best and brightest are squeezed out of the market once they become “expensive.” The industry’s

claim that American kids don’t study enough math and science is a red herring, and is rank hypocrisy, with the layoffs of thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who were math and science whizzes as kids.

A Work Force in Motion

Guillermina Jasso is professor of sociology at New York University, research fellow at IZA Bonn and a principal investigator on the New Immigrant Survey.

What we know about foreign workers who become legal permanent residents is that their status is quite fluid — shifting from temporary workers to permanent residency, and some times back to temporary status. There is also fluidity in the way such workers may move from illegal to legal immigration status.

For highly-skilled workers, there are three categories of employment-based permanent residency visas: EB-1 for those of extraordinary ability, outstanding researchers and multinational executives; EB-2 for those with advanced degrees or exceptional ability; and EB-3 for those with skills or college degrees.

Half of all new green card holders arrived on temporary visas, while those with permanent visas regularly leave.

The match between visa and person is neither perfect nor forever. Over half of all new legal permanent residents each year are already living in the United States on temporary visas, and those with permanent visas regularly leave the United States.

Data from the New Immigrant Survey, the first longitudinal study of a cohort of new legal immigrants, indicate that soon after admission to the U.S. on permanent visas, only about 78 percent of the 2003 cohort intended to stay. Intention to stay is even lower among the very highly-skilled immigrants: 59 percent in EB-1, 52 percent in EB-2, and 71 percent in EB-3 categories.

The low intention to stay may be due in part to the ban on employment for the spouses of many temporary workers, including those with H-1B visas. Such workers may seek legal permanent residence to obtain work authorization for their spouses.

Of course, highly-skilled workers also receive green cards in other ways. Among new legal permanent residents who had ever had student visas, 59 percent obtained their permanent visas as the spouse of a U.S. citizen.

Very high educational levels do not mean that high-skilled visa holders are immune from lapsing into illegality. Increasingly, for more and more immigrants, a spell of illegality is a stop along the road to legal status. Estimates indicate that although prior illegal status among highly-skilled visa holders is less than among all green card holders, it is not trivial — the data suggest 5 percent for the EB-1 holders, 7 percent for EB-2, and 24 percent for EB-3, versus 36 percent for the entire 2003 group.

The widespread notion that legals and illegals are two distinct populations is one of the two major misconceptions that has stymied efforts at immigration reform. The other is that legalization of illegals is an idea alien to American immigration law — in fact, it has been an integral part of the law since 1929, a few years after the start of immigration restriction.

Training Your Own Replacement

Ron Hira is assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology and co-author of “Outsourcing America.”

The U.S. has benefited economically, culturally and scientifically from high skill immigration. Look at any university faculty or research laboratory and the fruits are obvious. But the public debate over high-skill immigration has been plagued by widely held myths. The H-1B visa program — guest worker permits held by an employer — is thoroughly corrupted and needs to be cleaned up immediately.

Loopholes enable employers to hire H-1B workers at below-market wages, and bypass American workers, never even entertaining their applications for a position. In fact, some firms replace American workers and their contractors with guest workers on H-1B and other visas, at times even having their American workers train their foreign replacements. This is not a hypothetical problem: According to news reports, companies like I.B.M., Nielsen and Pfizer have engaged in such practices.

The corrupted H-1B program allows companies to train H-1B workers here, and then rotate them and their jobs offshore.

The H-1B application process effectively does nothing to protect U.S. or foreign workers and their working conditions. And there is virtually no oversight of the weak regulations in place. A recent audit of the program by Department of Homeland Security found that more than one in five H-1Bs were granted under false pretenses, either outright fraud or serious technical violations.

To qualify for an H-1B one only needs to hold a bachelor’s degree, something that one in four Americans in the work force have. Worse, contrary to conventional wisdom, the program actually speeds up the offshoring of American jobs.

This is so obvious that India’s commerce minister, Kamal Nath, has called the H-1B the “outsourcing visa.” In 2008, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and Tata Consultancy, all offshore outsourcing firms, were the top H-1B recipients. They use the H-1B and L-1 visa programs to facilitate the offshoring of American jobs to low-cost countries like India. Companies achieve this by bringing foreign workers to the U.S. for training and then rotating them back to their home country, with improved skills.

Employers can sponsor an H-1B worker for permanent immigration, but many never do so. For workers lucky enough to be sponsored, the wait for a green card can be as long as 10 years because the numbers of temporary work permits like the H-1B and L-1 being issued annually is far higher than for green cards.

While waiting for a green card H-1B workers are put in a horrible position. They effectively can’t change jobs or even take a promotion without going to the back of the green card line. This kills any bargaining power they might have with employers, depressing everyone’s wages and working conditions. In addition to reforming the H-1B and L-1 visas, we ought to clear out the backlog of those waiting for green cards and devise a more rational approach to high-skill immigration that is fair to American and foreign workers.

Both the American worker and the guest worker are harmed by the current immigration system. Who benefits from this mess? The corporations that can take advantage of exploitable workers.

Why Reject Entrepreneurial Spirit?

Mark Heesen is president of the National Venture Capital Association.

Foreign-born entrepreneurs have consistently contributed to our economy, to innovation and to new job creation. But current immigration policies are jeopardizing our ability to attract and retain these talented and highly driven individuals.

According to “American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness,” 25 percent of the venture-backed public companies that were established in the last 15 years were started by one or more immigrant founders, reaching 40 percent in the high-tech sector.

Foreign-born workers willing to leave their home countries tend to be risk takers and have the drive to start a business.

The aggregate market capitalization of these companies, which includes Intel, Google, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems and eBay, exceeds $500 billion. The “American Made” study found that of private, venture-backed start-up companies in the U.S., some 47 percent have immigrant founders. Just 10 years ago, such companies would not have been able to grow outside the U.S., but that is no longer the case.

Foreign-born entrepreneurs have been particularly successful in the start-up community for a number of reasons. First, these individuals, by their immigrant status alone, tend to be risk takers. Leaving their home countries suggests a level of tenacity and drive that is conducive to starting a business. Many have scientific backgrounds, and the focus and ability to invent breakthrough products and services. We want them here as students, workers and company builders.

While immigration policies have encouraged foreign-born nationals to get a higher education here, they have discouraged highly-skilled immigrants from staying here once they have their degrees. There are serious issues with the current H-1B visa program, but the limited number (65,000 a year) has prevented start-up companies from getting the talent they need to grow. At the same time, countries like China and India are aggressively nurturing their technology start-up ecosystems because they understand how America has grown its economy and want to do the same for themselves.

If the best talent can’t come here and stay, they will surely take their skills, ideas and companies elsewhere. The game is ours to lose. To maintain our competitive edge, we have to remain a magnet for global talent. Shutting our borders to these entrepreneurs is counterproductive. The more of them we can attract, the more jobs for everyone.

Low Salaries, Low Skills

John Miano is a lawyer and computer programmer.

The United States has a very generous immigration policy for skilled workers. America’s doors are wide open to the best minds in the world — both for permanent residency and for guest workers. For high-skilled workers with distinguished ability, the U.S. has “O” temporary guest worker visas, for which there is no numerical limit.

The debate in this area has been driven by a dumbing down of what “highly skilled” means.

The situation is the same for people seeking green cards. According to the latest visa bulletin from the State Department, there is currently no backlog for employment-based green cards for the highest-skilled workers. We already give people with the best skills a clear path for immigration. For those with professional skills (ranked below the highest-skilled workers) there is only a green card backlog for those from India and China. One has to go down to the last immigration preference before finding green card backlogs.

The fact is, our immigration policy is very welcoming to highly skilled workers, and has been for decades. But this aspect of the immigration system tends to get little attention. Instead, much of the debate in this area has been driven by a dumbing down of what “highly skilled” means. When the annual quotas on H-1B visas are exhausted, one often hears lobbyists arguing that the world’s best and brightest are being shut out.

But for the most part the people who seek H-1B visas — and may be barred by the quotas — are not extremely highly skilled workers. A college degree from a correspondence school can qualify someone for an H-1B visa. Employers making skill-based prevailing wage claims for H-1B computer workers classify most as being at the lowest skill level. The reported wages for the majority of H-1B computer workers is in the bottom 25th percentile of U.S. wages. In short, H-1B is a cheap labor program being marketed as a program for the highly-skilled.