NOTE: Article publised in an India controlled newspaper

Over One Million Stuck in Immigration Limbo: Report
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By RICHARD SPRINGER
India-West Staff Reporter
http://www.indiawest.com/view.php?subac ... m=&ucat=11

A new study has found that as of September 2006, there were 500,040 skilled immigrants languishing in employment-based visa categories awaiting legal permanent residence in the U.S. and an additional 555,044 family members awaiting adjustment of legal status.

The study also said that about one in five new legal immigrants in the U.S. and about one in three employment-based principals either are planning to leave the U.S. or are unsure about staying here.

Finally, these foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were co-inventors or co-inventors of 25.6 percent of the international patent applications filed from the U.S. in 2006.

"For the first time in its history, the United States faces the prospect of a reverse brain-drain," Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a co-author of the study, told India-West in an e-mail.

Calling the results "mind-blowing," Wadhwa said that because of "flawed immigration policies" in the U.S., the stage is set for the "departure of hundreds of thousands of highly skilled professionals - who we have trained in our technology, techniques and markets and made even more valuable."

"This is 'lose-lose' for the U.S. Our corporations lose key talent that is contributing to innovation and competitiveness, and we end up creating potential competitors," he said, adding that there is sufficient anecdotal evidence that talented Indian and Chinese technologists are returning to India and China.

"The immigration backlog is not simply a visa processing problem -which government agencies are working to reduce - but a visa shortage problem," the report says. "Only 120,000 or so visas are available annually for the million or so applicants."

The study, "Intellectual Property, the Immigrant Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain," is the third report by Wadhwa, founder of Relativity Technologies and a Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School, and his team at Duke.

Also contributing to the report were Harvard University economist Richard Freeman and New York University sociology professor and immigration expert Guillermina Jasso.

The two earlier reports found that one in four engineering and technology companies founded nationwide between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder; Indian immigrants founded more technology firms than the next four groups (the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan) combined; and the percentage of foreign nationals contributing to U.S. patent applications increased from about 7.3 percent in 1998 to 24.2 percent in 2006.

"I was shocked to learn that there were over a million skilled immigrants in what I call immigration limbo." Wadhwa said in his e-mail. "I had previously heard numbers in the 200,000-300,000 range and thought these numbers were very high."

"I doubt that political leaders in the U.S. are aware that there are so many skilled workers waiting in line - and that we may lose many of these."

Wadhwa said he is not in favor of expanding H-1B visas. "In fact, part of this problem has been created by our expanding the numbers of temporary workers we admit and not increasing the numbers of permanent resident visas. If the U.S. needs skilled immigrants, we should bring them here to stay - not as temporary workers.

Other highlights of the report:

Foreign nationals' contributions to international patent applications were highest by far in California, with Massachusetts a distant second and New Jersey third.

Foreign nationals and foreign residents contributed 72 percent of patents filed at Qualcomm, followed by Merck & Co. (65 percent), General Electric (64 percent), Siemens (63 Percent) and Cisco (60 percent). The numbers were far lower at Microsoft (3 percent) and General Motors (6 percent).

"A big surprise was the huge contribution that foreign nationals were making in creating global patents for top American firms," Wadhwa said. "The bigger surprise was that 41 percent of the U.S. government's global patents had foreign-nationals listed as inventors."

In 2006, 13.7 percent of international patent applications from the U.S. had an inventor with an Indian-heritage name, up from 9.5 percent in 1998. Inventors with Chinese-heritage names increased to 16.8 percent from 11.2 percent in the same period.

In 2006 in California, there were 1,625 patents filed by those with Indian names and 2,183 by Chinese out of a total of 9,196 total patent filers. In New Jersey in 2006, the 2,116 total patent applications included 448 by Indians and 634 by Chinese.

Wadhwa commented, "I was not surprised to see that California had such a high number of foreign nationals contributing to the global patents that its residents were filing, but New Jersey?"

"Foreign nationals contributed to 25.6 percent of all U.S. international patent applications in 2006, but the numbers were much higher in several states such as New Jersey (37 percent), California (36 percent) and Massachusetts (32 percent)."

Released Aug. 22 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the study used data from U.S. Homeland Security, Labor and State.