Reform H-1B Visas and Green Cards.

• Author: Bier, David J.

H-1B visas allow employers to hire skilled foreign workers for positions that require at least a bachelor's degree, but government rules limit the workers' ability to contribute to economic growth. A foreign worker can remain on an H-IB visa for no more than six years. There is a cap of 85,000 on the number of these visas that can be issued each year, though visas for universities and certain nonprofit or government research jobs do not count against that cap. The fees to obtain an H-1B visa can total as much as $8,500, not including lawyers' fees. For employers subject to the cap, the process takes a minimum of seven months to receive a visa.

Given the restrictions, delays, and costs, employers typically only hire H-1B workers for particularly high-value positions. In 2021, the median wage for H-IB workers was $ 108,000. Nearly 70 percent of workers hired in 2021 had an advanced degree, and 90 percent of the jobs were in "STEM" fields.

For the last decade, the H-1B cap has greatly constrained the ability of employers to hire eligible workers. Since 2014, the government has held a lottery to decide which employers will receive a slot, and the odds of winning have declined significantly. In the most recent lottery, less than a quarter of the applications were selected, leaving more than 350,000 applications unfulfilled. This represents a loss of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. productivity.

Aside front the immediate effects, the H-1B cap indirectly restricts the number of non-citizen permanent residents because the visa category acts as the launching point for most employer-sponsored permanent residency documents, commonly known as green cards. Compounding the H-1B cap problem is the fact that the government also caps the number of employer-sponsored green cards issued each year, so fewer immigrants can leave H-1B status to become permanent residents.

The vast majority of pending green card applications--nearly 90 percent--are from India. The law limits immigrants from any single country to no more than 7 percent of the green cards issued each year, regardless of that country's population (though if a portion of the overall cap would otherwise go unused, they are redistributed to the countries that have reached their country caps). Since Indians are about three-quarters of all H-IB workers, a green card application backlog of over a million workers and their immediate families has developed. The government is currently processing the...