America’s visa restrictions lead to reverse brain drain

Tom Brokaw submitted an excellent article on this topic March 3 on NBC. For the full report click here. 

The creator of SnapDeal is an Indian entrepreneur. SnapDeal has created 300 jobs in India — and counting. The founder of this company is Kunar Bahl. “I put my chips in the American basket and said let me try my hand here,” said Bahl, who earned an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a business degree from its Wharton School. But Bahl’s visa ran out, and he took his skills back to India.

Why are we losing individuals such as Mr. Bahl? He could have created those jobs in the United States. But, the H-1B is a a strange visa. The visa has a bizarre cap system—65,000 total visas with and an advanced degree exemption provided to the first 20,000 petitions filed for a beneficiary who has obtained a U.S. master’s degree or higher.

Why do we have this H-1B cap system? If the economy is shrinking we do not need a visa cap. Companies are shrinking not hiring, rendering the visa cap irrelevant. If the economy is booming, the H-1B visa cap system is actually hurting the economy in aggregate. If the economy is growing why would we turn away skilled professionals such as Mr. Bahl? Such an individual, if allowed to stay, would have created job opportunities domestically. This would have allowed the continued growth of the domestic economy. Instead, the H-1B cap system is creating reverse brain drain, as documented in Mr. Brokaw’s NBC article.

Congress should do away with the H-1B cap system. If Congress insists on keeping the cap, perhaps it should consider a dynamic cap number, rather than a static one. What I mean by a dynamic limit is that if the economy grows by a particular amount, Congress should raise the 65,000 amount based on that growth figure. We will see what, if anything, Congress decides to do.