H1b visas

US universities have been attracting students from foreign countries since the 1950s. The “brain drain” to recruit the best engineers and scientists had been going on for a long time before the 1950s. Most of these valuable immigrants came from troubled foreign countries.

AJC 5/11/18 page A-5 article: Program for non-US students grows. It reports that in 2016, 172,000 non-US students attended US universities. In 2004, this number was 45,000. Applications have dropped by 7% since 2017 with Trump’s “Hire American” message.  But our engineering classes are still full of foreign students who occupy the top of the class. I assume the drop may not include engineering students.

The first engineer I ever hired was from India. It was 1967 and I was at Kearney National. I hired him to design devices we sold to electrical power utilities. My next encounter with foreign-born engineers was in the 1990s. One of the electronics companies I did consulting work for had hired Chinese engineers to develop their software. They worked day and night and did a great job that enabled FATS, Inc. to dominate the weapons simulator market for law enforcement and the military.

These Chinese engineers were from the PRC and had been hand-picked by the PRC to complete the BSE in electronics and ballistics. The PRC had no aerospace jobs for these graduates, so they came to the US for their MSEE. FATS hired them to develop a very complex software system. Many of these engineers are still with the company and are invaluable. In 2016, I hired a BSEE from India. She was superb and none of the other applicants even came close. She was already a US citizen and didn’t require an H1b visa.

It will be a struggle to find high-performing engineers for a while. We killed off the labor market for engineers after the 2008 Meltdown.  It takes a few years to get good engineers to apply unless you know where they have been hiding.

I support the new tighter H1b proposals in Congress. I encourage companies to stop trying to hire technicians with the H1b. If they can’t do design work, they are not real engineers. I would restrict use of the H1b to BSEE holders with high GPAs.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader