H-1B Visas: Necessary? Or Evil?
H-1B Visas: Necessary? Or Evil?
The immigration reform bill may have been killed off (at least for now) by the U.S. Senate, but the issues that have spurred the debate live on.
While much of the public debate over immigration has focused on illegal immigrants, border fences and guest-worker programs, a smaller but just as heated debate has raged over whether to increase the number of visas for high-skilled workers–including architects–allowed into the country.
Currently, 65,000 of these visas – called H-1Bs – are issued each year for foreigners with expertise in information technology, architecture, engineering, mathematics, science, medicine and other professional avocations. However, the demand for these visas is so high that the entire supply of H-1Bs for the upcoming year was exhausted in a single day last April. The Senate immigration bill would have increased the number of H-1Bs made available each year to up to 180,000.
While advocates of lifting the H-1B cap say that more of the visas are necessary to ensure an adequate high-skilled workforce in the U.S., particularly in Silicon Valley, opponents say that H-1B visa-holders take jobs away from Americans and that some companies abuse the process (there even have been allegations of firms bringing in workers on H-1B visas to train them so that the firms can ship work back to them when the workers return home).
The debate over H-1Bs in the design profession has been no less intense. Some argue that a shortage of licensed professional architects in the U.S. requires firms to look for talent overseas–and that if firms aren’t able to bring architects in from abroad, they will simply farm the work to offices offshore. Other argue that an increase in H-1Bs will make it harder for American architects to find work, that quality will suffer, and that the security of high-profile facilities will be compromised.
The immigration bill may be dormant for the time being, but the issue is not going away. How do you feel about H-1B visas? Are they good for the profession, or a danger? Is the current cap hurting the industry, or having little effect? And are there other ways to increase the workforce?