Unbeknownst to the majority of campus, there is a population of senior international students who will be forced to leave the country in one year's time. Canadians, Koreans and Germans, along with many of your fellow international friends, are now forced to wait to hear whether or not they will be deported.
The visa that we all pine for is the H-1B, a visa for skilled workers. Just like everyone else who is applying for this visa, I already have a job in the United States so there is no risk of me freeloading on the resources of your fine nation. There is a cap of 65,000 visas each year, of which 6,800 are reserved for workers from Chile and Singapore. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced that it received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year 2008 after only one day. By late afternoon on April 2, USCIS had received over 119,000 cap-subject H-1B petitions for the 58,200 available slots. This huge over-filing of the H-1B left everyone completely shocked.
To compare, last year it took approximately two months before the cap was reached. The consequence is that there will be a random lottery to determine who will be processed and receive a visa to work in the United States.
I never, in my often loopy imagination, thought that part of a 65-minute lecture in Econ 39 would prove to be so important to the next stage of my life. This cap on skilled workers is meant to protect domestic workers from the competition of skilled laborers from abroad, but the cap is merely displacing your friends and fellow students from a place they have called home for the last four years. This clearly protectionist measure seems antithetical especially to the current relationship between the United States and Canada, a relationship based on free movement of resources, goods and services (America approached Canada with a joint venture to put satellites into space with laser beams to shoot down missiles but it won't let me stay and work?).
I am not principally arguing that Canadians should be under different rules, because in fact, they are. There is a TN visa that Canadians can apply for but when I mentioned this to my employers, they pretty much laughed and said that the scope of the TN visa is so narrow such that almost no Canadians would qualify in their firm.
Bill Gates has spoken out adamantly about the visa cap twice in the last three months; the first time, it was made the cover of the Financial Times, and the second time was only two weeks ago, as the Wall Street Journal reported. The United States may be protecting its workers from international competition but it is also crippling its own economy by keeping intelligent, capable workers out of its own firms and is placing a cap on the value that its firms can produce.
To reiterate, I am not talking about "your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free...." I am talking about highly motivated and skilled workers who already have jobs in the United States and have employers who are willing to file visas on their behalf.
If I don't "win" a visa in the next few weeks when the random lottery is executed, I will have to leave the United States after my student work visa (Optional Practical Training) runs out in April of 2008. I will have to leave my life in New York City as well as my friends and possibly my job.
If any of you have any rich or powerful relatives that have considerable influence in the government, or if anyone is looking to get into a non-exclusive marriage, you can contact me at chris.chan@dartmouth.edu.
