Business Groups Not Backing Down on Immigration Reform

[Freewill]

The real reason, in my opinion, that immigration reform is such a push. It supports big business, why else? When, in the history of America, was there such an emphasis on low wage/none labor?

Business Groups Not Backing Down on Immigration Reform - US News

A new report reveals if Congress does not act to overhaul the country’s immigration system, the future could be bleak for businesses who depend on lower-skilled workers.

The study, which was released during a Capitol Hill meeting co-hosted by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a bipartisan group of mayors and business leaders, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, finds that while there is still a strong demand for low-skilled workers, the number of Americans willing to fill those low-skill jobs has dwindled dramatically during the last two decades.

 

[g5000]

“About 40 percent of our Ph.D. scientists and engineers were born in another country,” Orrenius writes. “People tend to focus on illegal or low-skilled immigration when discussing immigrants and often do not recognize the tremendous contribution of high-skilled immigrants.”

Dallas Federal Reserve

A new study, released last week, throws new information into the debate over foreign workers who arrive in the U.S. on such specialty visas.

The report, based on telephone surveys with 2,054 companies and projections by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University, says about 25 percent of the technology and engineering companies launched in the U.S. in the past decade had at least one foreign-born founder.

Immigrants Become Founding Fathers

These immigrant founders tended to be highly educated—96 percent held bachelor’s degrees and 74 percent held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 75 percent of these degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related fields. The vast majority of these company founders didn’t come to the United States as entrepreneurs 52 percent came to study, 40 percent came to work, and 5.5 percent came for family reasons. Only 1.6 percent came to start companies in America.

Even though these founders immigrated for other purposes initially, they typically started their companies just 13.25 years after arriving in the United States. And, rather than settling in well-established immigrant gateways, such as New York or Los Angeles, they moved to a diverse group of tech centers across the country and helped fuel their growth.

http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/WadhwaTBook09.pdf

While 23 percent of the nation's cooks and 20 percent of its janitors were immigrants in 2000, 27 percent of new computer-software engineers were also immigrants, according to a recent Migration Policy Institute study.

Indeed, the more technically educated the group, the more likely immigrants are to be overrepresented in it. While the foreign born make up 15 percent of the overall workforce, according to the 2000 census, they constitute approximately 17 percent of those with a bachelor's degree in science and engineering occupations, 29 percent of those with a master's degree, and 39 percent of those with a doctoral degree.

As US nears milestone, a rising mix of immigrants - CSMonitor.com



"[T]he more technically educated the group, the more likely immigrants are to be overrepresented in it."