A group of technology CEOs and company founders, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, has announced the formation of a public interest group named FWD.us, intended to lobby for education reform among immigrants in schools.
Zuckerberg outlined the idea in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, where he described his experiences teaching an after-school program on entrepreneurship. During one class he realized that one of his best students lacked the legal right to attend college in the United States, a problem he says drains the country of many bright minds.
The United States needs to promote a talented workforce, yet it “kicks out” more than 40 percent of math and science graduate students who are not U.S. citizens, he wrote in his op-ed. FWD.us will advocate for change in immigration policy so that, in part, the nation can attract and keep talented, hard-working people within its borders.
The group includes executives such as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo; Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix; and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. Zuckerberg said they’re forming the group partly because they want to make knowledge available to everyone. “The more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become,” he wrote.
For foreign-born workers with special skills like computer programming or engineering, a temporary visa such as the H1-B offers the chance to work in the United States for a set amount of time, but few are available. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), H1-B visas reached their cap within a week of the filing period this year. The USCIS received 124,000 petitions, but the cap for the fiscal year was set at 65,000, so immigrants who missed the filing period need to wait another year to file again. For Zuckerberg, the H1-B process is flawed and cannot keep up with the number of immigrants qualified for specialty jobs in the science and technology fields — jobs, he said, that create more jobs for Americans in return.
The nonprofit research organization Immigration Policy Center noted that, among science, technology, engineering and mathematics professions, 26 percent of Ph.D. holders in the United States are foreign-born. More scientists and engineers here would be immigrants if not for the limit of the current immigration system. The center also argues that these foreign-born workers do not displace U.S.-born workers, as supply for these positions scarcely ever keeps up with demand.
Zuckerberg suggests today’s economy grows through the expansion of knowledge, so skilled immigrants add a new dimension to opportunities of economic growth. FWD.us will work “with members of Congress from both parties, the administration and state and local officials,” Zuckerberg wrote.
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