Balance Needed for High Skills Immigration Reform.

• Author: Ackerman, Ben

The U.S. defense industrial base faces a critical science, technology, engineering and math talent shortage, exacerbated by an outdated immigration system.

As has been highlighted previously in this space and reiterated by national security experts in many fora, increasing "high skills immigration" is a critical national security issue. While the government and defense contractors struggle to hire new STEM employees, caps on available visas force thousands of foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities to return home rather than remain here.

Responding to calls for reform, advocates have proposed legislation to exempt all foreign citizens who have earned an advanced STEM degree at a U.S. university from numerical visa caps. However, a similar reform effort failed last summer when a nearly identical measure was left out of the China-focused competition bill, the CHIPS and Science Act.

Advocates are right to continue pushing for high skills immigration reform--but if these efforts do not address concerns raised during previous debates on this issue, new legislative attempts will likely fail as well.

Given the complex and sensitive nature of today's immigration debate, a broad reform design would be unlikely to succeed. A pragmatic look at immigration and the political context suggests that a more measured proposal, which navigates security and labor concerns, offers a better chance of successfully moving forward.

Some of the more sweeping reform attempts have failed to address legitimate growing apprehension about the Chinese Communist Party's attempted influence on, and espionage in, U.S. society. In the current political climate, a significant increase in the number of visas allowed without a corresponding expansion in robust security procedures is likely to fail as it does not present the sort of balanced approach that gathers consensus.

For example, some opponents of last summer's bill raised concerns that the Chinese government could use the additional visas to bring spies into the United States.

Some have even called for a total ban on admitting Chinese students to U.S. universities due to perceived systemic weaknesses in the vetting system, even though most Chinese students would remain in the country after graduation and provide much-needed high caliber support to our talent-strapped defense industrial base.

There is also skepticism in some circles about the value of cooperation between U.S. and Chinese companies. For example, several...