My View: Broken Immigration System Loses Jobs
SOURCE: Deseret News
By David Kirkham, CEO of Kirkham Motorsports
This may be the first argument for legal immigration reform that incorporates the following: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Mitsubishi machine tools, Utah’s state Legislature, Miss America, and my kids’ high school.
How do these disparate elements fit together? Sen. Hatch sponsored an amendment to the so-called “Gang of 8″ proposal. The amendment, which was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, is designed to meet the critical needs of American employers by raising the numbers of high skilled (H1-B) visas available for foreign workers. It also funds state efforts to enhance science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education through increased fees desperate employers will gladly pay. Sen. Hatch’s hope is to stimulate job creation by bringing in more job-creating, high-skilled workers from abroad, and to then help fund training for the next generation of American workers.
Having dealt with our broken immigration system (especially on H1-Bs) for my company, I strongly support Sen. Hatch’s amendment. Comprehensive reform — to which there is no perfect solution — is necessary. The immigration crisis was created by both parties over decades — we Republicans have an obligation to do our best to help fix the system we helped break.
I recently joined a few hundred American manufacturers at a single-vendor trade show in Chicago, sponsored by Mitsubishi’s machine tool division. Much talk from executives at the conference was about the deplorable state of America’s education system in STEM and the acute shortage of skilled workers who could actually operate the million-dollar machines we were there to consider buying. H1-B reform was also top-of-mind with the attendees – all were in favor of lifting the outdated caps, set in 1990.
All agreed that students leaving community college today with an appropriate two-year technical degree will not have to look for a job — the jobs will look for them. As one acquaintance put it, “If they are breathing, they start at $20 per hour and go up.” Every CEO agreed that each immigrant engineer they could hire would produce between three and five additional domestic jobs.
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