Trump and H-1B Visas: What's to Come?

摘要

Almost 20 years ago, I remember reading a column from Electronic Design's then editor-in-chief talking about the controversy surrounding H-1B visas and their potential impact on EEs in the United States. As the saying goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same," as I now sit writing this column for you. Since the late 1990s, the controversy surrounding H-1B has at times gone quiet, but never completely died. In the engineering world, the fact is that importing talent has allowed many companies to stay competitive by hiring highly skilled and specialized engineers who were not available in the United States or not in the needed numbers. The other side of the argument points to a chicken-and-egg scenario: By not hiring U.S. engineers because they lacked certain skills or knowledge, we failed to pressure our schools and universities to "raise the bar," so to speak, thus creating a door that had to be continuously propped open. We're now in a moment in history where our current president has made unemployed workers a core focus, which has put H-1B again under fire.