H1-Bs and startups

This post on the Meebo blog the other day about their experience with H1-B visas caused quite a stir in the comments. This year the H1-B quota was all used up about 2 months, leaving a lot of companies and a lot of people in a pretty bad situation: now two of meebo's new team members cant work in the US for another year and a half! Thats *aaages* in internet time. When this happens for a large corporation its already bad enough, but for a company the size of meebo, those two new employees represent like 20% of their workforce!

When the topic of immigration policy comes up, there's always a pretty fiery debate. The comments were full of stories about abuse of H1-B workers and the standard protectionist economics arguments in favor of the quota. While the protectionist argument does make a lot of political sense-- the people that benefit directly from it are the ones with the larger voting power-- economically it's probably the wrong solution.

If you want to make sure that Americans get the best jobs, then focus on making Americans the most qualified for that job and optionally provide businesses with an incentive to hire them. Depending solely on articifial barriers, such as an immigration quota, only avoids solving the true problem and creates the wrong incentives. For example: the most common suggestion given in the comments was to open a meebo office in another country. The current quota program encourages companies to send jobs offshore, where the workers wont be paying US taxes or contributing to the US GDP.

The truth is that the kind of people Meebo is looking for really are in short supply: not any schlub that knows some javascript is going to cut it. They want the smartest and the most innovative people they can get-- if the first ones they find happen to be born outside of the US, then so be it. It is more costly for the economy for companies like meebo to either have to lower their hiring standards or to wait for a local hire to appear, than it is to bring someone in from another country. (While it may only take an extra month to find a local hire, by that time meebo could've pushed out two new releases of features to their servers!) These startups and technology companies are keeping the US on the cutting edge of technology, and it is in the country's best interest to make sure they have the workforce they need to keep it that way.

I'm not advocating totally removing the quota either... there were many examples in that thread of comments that describe why this is undesireable. A better system must exist between these two extremes. Hopefully, now that immigration reform has become a mainstream political issue, there will be some dialog that results in a better system for both businesses and Americans.

Disclaimer: I'm on an H1-B visa in the USA, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be here. However, this may cause me to be a bit biased on this issue ;)