Temporary and Permanent Entry of Engineers and Scientists to the USA
David S. North
When US employers hire foreign-born engineers they are much more likely to hire workers with temporary visas than those with permanent status in the US.
Workers with temporary visas, by law, are tied to their employers. Immigrants with permanent visas are able, like US citizens, to move around freely in the labour market and thus can better fend for themselves economically.
In the last fiscal year (1995) US employers caused the admission of 55,860 alien engineers with temporary (non-immigrant) visas. That was at least the eighth consecutive year that the number of alien engineers with temporary visas had increased; in fact, there were almost three times as many of them in the fiscal year 1995 as there were in the fiscal year 1988. (See Table 1.)
Meanwhile, for the fourth consecutive year, the number of newly admitted alien engineers with permanent visas fell. There were 9,104 such admission in the fiscal year 1995.
Admissions of immigrant engineers has never stirred controversy, but there has been a vigorous debate in Congress, and in the industry, about the alleged exploitation of technical workers with temporay visas, particularly in computer programming and other engineering fields.
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service counts the numbers of arriving immigrants by occupation, and routinely issues statistics on the subject (see Table 2 on next page). It also secures hard counts on the admission of non-immigrants by visa category, but only obtains occupational data on a sampling of them.
| Table 1: Admissions of engineers:
immigrants and non-immigrants, fiscal years
|
||
| Immigrants | Non-immigrants | |
| 1988
1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 |
8,081
9,520 10,417 10,676 15,629a 12,084 10,799 9,104 |
19,939
22,522 26,040 35,619 36,826 39,786 43,778 55,860 |
| a The Immigration Act
of 1990 took effect at the start of the fiscal year 1992, and it caused
a surge of employment-based immigration that year because one of its provisions
eased a backlog situation.
Sources: These are hard counts of immigrants and estimates for non-immigrants based on data from the Division of Statistics, US Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington. For the methodology used for the non-immigrant estimates, see the explanation at the bottom of Table 2. Note: There is an unknown but significant overlap between the two columns, as people admitted as non-immigrants often convert to immigrant status several years after their arrival in the US. Someone recorded as an non-immigrant in the 1988 data, for example, may also be recorded as an immigrant in 1990 or 1991 data. The non-immigrants covered by this table are primarily H (temporary workers), J (exchange visitors), L (multinational corporation employees), and those admitted under the free Trade Agreements with Canada and (to a much lesser extent) Mexico. Neither foreign students (F-1) nor visitors for business (B-1) are included. |
||
| Table 2: Admissions of scientists and engineeers on temporary working visas, fiscal year 1995 (estimates by occupational group and visa category) | |||||||
| Visa class/
occupational group |
H-1B | H-2B
and H-3 |
J-1 | L-1 | NFTA & TC (trade agreements) | Misc. visa classes | Totals |
| Engineering
Computer & Maths Natural sciences |
27,176
8,940 3,502 |
732
24 21 |
3,061
286 4,534 |
20,766
1,980 1,301 |
3,621
2,636 1,310 |
504
49 93 |
55,860
13,915 10,761 |
| Total | 39,618 | 777 | 7,881 | 24,047 | 7,567 | 646 | 80,635 |
| Source: Estimates made by the author, based on INS admissions data (printout 614) for these visa classes; while the total number of admissions in each of these classes is a count, occupational data are collected only on a sample of those admitted. For more on the estimating techniques used, see the appendix to David S. North, Soothing the Establishment: The impact of Foreign-born Scientists and Engineers on America, University Press of America, Inc., Lanham, MD, 1995 | |||||||
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