Pittsburgh needs immigration reform

Highly skilled immigrants can help us build a brighter future

Why should Pittsburghers support immigration reform — specifically the expansion of H-1B and other high-skill visas that allow U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations?

It’s simple. Our region needs to grow its population, talent pipeline and diversity to replenish our aging workforce. Immigration is part of the solution.

The H-1B and other guestworker visas help regions build new companies and attract new citizens. Immigrants in California have fueled more than half of company formation in the state over the past 20 years.

Over the next 15 years, the Pittsburgh region will face a demographics challenge that will change its shape for generations to come. If today’s trends continue, with more people retiring than starting jobs, our workforce will run about 140,000-people short. Even with productivity continuing to increase, we face dire deficits in talent now, which will only grow larger.

As jobs and people left our region over recent decades, an under-employed and under-served population was left behind. Now, to build our workforce we must improve education, especially for minorities; attract and retain jobs; promote non-discriminatory practices — and support sensible immigration reform. The good news is that local leaders and institutions have identified immigration as an important issue and are working on it.

In Pittsburgh, the coming worker-job gap is most evident in the high-skill and technical sectors of our workforce. Many will ask, why can’t we find Americans for these jobs?

Well, we should better train Americans to fill these openings, but that would solve only part of the problem. In January 2015, the United States had more than five job postings advertised online for every unemployed “computer and mathematical science” worker. So, even after improving our education system, we still would face a shortage of workers to fill these high-skill, highwage positions.

Some say employers use H-1B and other high-skill visas to suppress wages. But the occupations for which employers request the most high-skill visas have seen higher-than-average wage growth in recent years. And in the metropolitan areas with the largest number of high-skill visa requests, average wages for science, technology, engineering and math occupations are high. Studies find that H-1B workers actually raise regional wages by generating innovation, boosting local economic activity and increasing productivity.

In 2013, Pittsburgh had 1,600 H-1B approvals. These new, highly skilled Pittsburghers will bring enormous benefits to our region. Last year, our population would have dropped yet again if not for the 3,200 immigrants that chose to come to Pittsburgh. How much higher would that number have been with immigration reform?

A challenge for our region and the nation is the statutory limit of 65,000 placed on the number of H-1B visas issued each year. On April 1, the immigration service began accepting H1-B applications for this year. The cap was reached April 7. Each year, countless visa requests from Pittsburgh-based employers are rejected and others may not even try to apply because of the cap.

Vibrant Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Technology Council applaud Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, other local officials and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development for advocating commonsense immigration reform — reform that would both raise the H-1B cap and provide a legal pathway to citizenship for the immigrants we need to fill and create the jobs of the future.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, recently introduced the Immigration Innovation Act of 2015, which would allow the H-1B cap to range between 115,000 and 195,000 based on demand. For the sake of the Pittsburgh region, let’s call on our nation’s leaders to act on this critical issue.