According to a recent report, “The Trump administration is preparing to roll out another set of restrictions on legal immigration, citing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.” Pursuant to an April executive order, it is drafting new limits to be issued under a second order. Some experts speculate that a slate of visas are under consideration to be temporarily suspended, including L-1 visas for intracompany transfers, H-1Bs for high-skilled workers, H-2Bs for temporary non-agricultural workers and J-1 visas for exchange visitors.
Pandemic-driven unemployment numbers do not support the idea that foreign temporary workers harm the re-employment prospects of American workers who have been laid off (temporarily or otherwise). It’s a distortion of the many positive ways in which skilled immigration makes Americans better off. Just take a look at some of the empirical evidence.
The H-1B visa, created by Congress in 1990, has played a fundamental role in driving innovation and business growth in the United States for almost 30 years. Under the program, 65,000 new visas are issued every year, with an additional 20,000 available to workers with a U.S. master’s degree or higher. To put that number into perspective, 85,000 new annual H-1B petitions equals 0.05 percent of the U.S. labor force.
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