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Based on the assumptions and averages used in the analysis, hiring 300 or more additional IJs (bringing the total number of IJs to 949) would begin to reduce the backlog—meaning that at this level, the IJ corps would be expected to complete more cases than EOIR receives in a given fiscal year. Hiring 300 IJs, however, likely would not fully clear the backlog in the observed 10-year timeframe (i.e., by FY2033). 28 Under these projections, an additional 700 IJs (1,349 total) would be the minimum number needed to fully clear the backlog by FY2032, holding all other factors constant.

At present, there are about 8.6 million immigration applications pending before the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS). Of those, 5.2 million are backlogged, experiencing longer than usual processing times. As with many federal agencies, the USCIS’s operations were substantially disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic; it is a public-facing agency, conducting a substantial share of its activities with members of the public and often in person.

The USCIS is also unique among government agencies in that it is almost entirely funded by user fees, mostly receipts from foreigners applying to enter or remain in the country. The agency receives about 97% of its funding through the imposition and collection of fees charged to immigration applicants. While making immigrants pay entirely for their own processing costs may seem fair, this financing model means that the agency has little to no capacity to increase resources to catch up when it falls behind, and today it is woefully behind.

The Immigration Court is an administrative court within the Department of Justice (DOJ) responsible for adjudicating immigration cases in the United States. Immigration judges preside over the courts and resolve such questions as:

whether an individual should be allowed to remain in the U.S. (i.e., whether he or she is "admissible" or "removable") and, in some cases, whether he or she is a U.S. citizen;

US federal district courts have exclusive jurisdiction over patent infringement claims. Popular districts for patent disputes include the District of Delaware, the Eastern District of Texas, and the Northern District of California. Many districts that regularly hear patent cases have special rules for patent cases. Some districts are known for the rapid pace at which they proceed to trial, while others tend to move at a slower pace. Patent cases usually last between two and four years.

According to newly released data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), more foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are enjoying such happy endings. The jump comes after USCIS in January 2022 tweaked its guidance criteria relating to two visa categories available to STEM workers. One is the O-1A, a temporary visa for “aliens of extraordinary ability” that often paves the way to a green card. The second, which bestows a green card on those with advanced STEM degrees, governs a subset of an EB-2 (employment-based) visa.

The USCIS data, reported exclusively by ScienceInsider, show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30%, to 4570, and held steady in fiscal year 2023, which ended on 30 September. Similarly, the number of STEM EB-2 visas approved in 2022 after a “national interest” waiver shot up by 55% over 2021, to 70,240, and stayed at that level this year.

Sabri Ben-Achour: When it comes to the economics of immigration, there is the big one: immigration and its effect on wages and jobs. So let’s start there. Does immigration reduce wages?

Zeke Hernandez: The short answer is no. I understand that that’s a big question, but we have enough evidence to know that the answer is no. Immigration doesn’t cause job losses, either, for native workers.

Choking off the flow of talent—or worse, giving that talent over to our adversaries—would pose a significant national security risk. At the same time, the risks posed to U.S. intellectual property from espionage are also significant, especially from individuals with access to classified or sensitive information. In a report for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Institute for Defense Analyses investigated the costs and benefits of retaining foreign STEM talent inside the United States and found that the benefits far outweigh the costs.30 First, the report analyzed cases of Chinese violations of intellectual property rights and found that the most important avenue for misappropriating U.S. trade secrets is through cybercrime. Second, it did not find evidence that foreign-born STEM talent is more likely to engage in espionage on U.S. weapons systems than citizens born in the United States. Altogether, the findings highlight the need to develop counter-espionage methods and further develop integrity provision and vetting procedures so that the United States does not deny itself a source of talent that contributes 1.7%–1.9% of GDP.

The Commission soundly rejected an approach favored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to prevent Chinese-born researchers from studying in science and technology fields in the United States, arguing such a policy would be a huge benefit to the Chinese Communist Party.

“Immigration policy can also slow China’s progress,” according to the report. “China’s government takes the threat of brain drain seriously, noting that the United States’ ability to attract and retain China’s talent is an obstacle to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ambitions. Increasing China’s brain drain will create a dilemma for the CCP—which will be forced to choose between losing even more human capital, further slowing their economic growth and threatening their advancement in AI, or denying Chinese nationals opportunities to study and work in the United States.”

Savchuk 23[Katia Savchuk is an award-winning freelance magazine journalist and a former staff reporter at Forbes and is citing work from several researchers. Said researchers are as follows:Rebecca Diamon is a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon is a PhD student at Stanford GSB. Beatriz Pousada is a PhD student at Stanford. Shai Bernstein is from the Harvard Business School. Timothy McQuade is from the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. 3-13-2023, "A New Look at Immigrants’ Outsize Contribution to Innovation in the U.S.," Stanford Graduate School of Business, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/new-look-immigrants-outsize-contribution-innovation-us aawh]

To find the answer, the researchers looked at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. They found that immigrants made an outsize contribution to innovation in the U.S. While they comprised 16% of inventors, immigrants were behind 23% of the patents issued over these years.

Immigration is America’s superpower. According to research by William Kerr at Harvard, between 2000 and 2010, America received more migrating inventors than every other country combined.

However, for decades, our broken immigration system has stacked obstacles in front of immigrants, succeeding in spite of itself thanks to the overwhelming desire of global talent to move here. But this pattern of migration that has served the U.S. so well is starting to change. Facing ever-growing wait times for green cards in the United States, talented immigrants are increasingly looking abroad for opportunities. According to a survey released last year by Boston Consulting Group, for the first time Canada has replaced the U.S. as the most desirable location for migrants moving for work.

The United States should embrace increased movement of people as an integral and beneficial fact of the world today, lead the international community in developing a coherent, legal, and humane management plan, and leverage U.S. history as a diverse society to benefit the U.S. economy and society writ large. As a result, the US could restore its reputation, become an appealing focal point for people around the world, and gain significant soft power. Migration is a major part of the world today, and it is an area where China is a non-player. The United States has a notable potential edge in this area over China. Washington should exploit it.

Is the United States inadvertently rejecting a strategic advantage in its competition with China?

In addition, though studies suggest that the short-term economic benefits of immigration are relatively small, and that unskilled workers may suffer from competition, skilled immigrants can be important to particular sectors ― and to long-term growth. There is a strong correlation between the number of visas for skilled applicants and patents filed in the U.S. At the beginning of this century, Chinese- and Indian-born engineers were running one-quarter of Silicon Valley's technology businesses, which accounted for $17.8 billion in sales; and, in 2005, immigrants had helped to start one-quarter of all U.S. technology start-ups during the previous decade. Immigrants or children of immigrants founded roughly 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies.

Equally important are immigration's benefits for America's soft power. The fact that people want to come to the U.S. enhances its appeal, and immigrants' upward mobility is attractive to people in other countries. The U.S. is a magnet, and many people can envisage themselves as Americans, in part because so many successful Americans look like them. Moreover, connections between immigrants and their families and friends back home help to convey accurate and positive information about the U.S.

The pitfalls in the U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent pipeline, particularly with international students, are glaring. As America attracts the world’s most promising minds and educates them at America’s best universities, the U.S. government funds their research through taxpayer dollars — then fails to provide a pathway for them to stay in the United States. Due to America’s byzantine immigration system, as many as 90 percent of foreign students receiving advanced degrees in STEM fields are forced to leave the country after graduation, massively depleting America’s potential workforce.

Our national security innovation base — the ecosystem comprising U.S. national security organizations, research laboratories, defense primes, industry disruptors, and venture capital — is especially vulnerable to these talent shortfalls. Research, development, and manufacturing in AI, quantum computing, hypersonic weapons, and autonomy are precisely the sectors where Washington needs the most talented minds working to advance U.S. national security. The end result is a paradox in which America trains the world’s best and brightest and then sends them home — many to adversary nations.

Attracting and Retaining Foreign Talent: Fewer than 5 percent of U.S. doctorate degree holders in relevant fields focus on quantum science. In addition to doctoral level researchers, workers with skills in quantum hardware manufacturing and software development are in great demand. Many U.S. graduates with relevant degrees in physics and engineering are foreign nationals who are educated at leading U.S. universities and then required by the U.S. immigration system to leave the country upon graduation. To address the trained workforce challenges described here, in addition to greatly expanded programs to grow the domestic workforce, a “quantum carve-out” is needed in U.S. immigration policy—one that would enable QIS graduates to remain in the United States with a path to permanent resident status. Quantum-trained engineers are simply too rare and too valuable to be pushed out of the United States’ nascent quantum ecosystem. Similarly, it is essential that any new export controls provide a “deemed export exclusion” so that qualified foreign nationals are free to work within the U.S. industrial sector.

The pitfalls in the U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent pipeline, particularly with international students, are glaring. As America attracts the world’s most promising minds and educates them at America’s best universities, the U.S. government funds their research through taxpayer dollars — then fails to provide a pathway for them to stay in the United States. Due to America’s byzantine immigration system, as many as 90 percent of foreign students receiving advanced degrees in STEM fields are forced to leave the country after graduation, massively depleting America’s potential workforce.

Our national security innovation base — the ecosystem comprising U.S. national security organizations, research laboratories, defense primes, industry disruptors, and venture capital — is especially vulnerable to these talent shortfalls. Research, development, and manufacturing in AI, quantum computing, hypersonic weapons, and autonomy are precisely the sectors where Washington needs the most talented minds working to advance U.S. national security. The end result is a paradox in which America trains the world’s best and brightest and then sends them home — many to adversary nations.

The United States succeeded in first harnessing quantum technologies thanks to an influx of emigrating physicists before World War II, and the centrality of immigrants for advancing the U.S. quantum ecosystem is unlikely to change in the future. Despite partisan rancor over immigration, bipartisan efforts like the Keep STEM Talent Act illustrate that there are areas for compromise across the aisle. But immigration reform is overdue to sustain the United States’s competitive edge in quantum and other STEM fields. Failure to find a lasting immigration solution will constrain the United States at the moment it should be welcoming highly trained individuals to nurture a national quantum ecosystem. A message emerging from OSTP via a quantum strategy will stress the need for immigration reform. 

Tracing causal mechanisms is hardly clean-cut, but Pekkala Kerr offered several explanations for these differences. Immigrants are, by definition, individuals who have taken a significant risk in leaving their home country to seek better opportunities abroad. This kind of act is itself an entrepreneurial endeavor, and as a group they appear to be more inclined to calculated risk-taking.

The discussion above is restricted to the effects of skilled immigration on existing, incumbent firms; while the empirical evidence thus far lands mostly on the side of skilled immigrants having a strong positive impact on firm innovation, productivity, and performance, there is still some debate.3 The effects of skilled immigrants on start-up performance—along a host of metrics including start-up creation, survival, success, and ability to attract venture capital funding—are, in contrast, more clear-cut. It may seem unlikely that immigrants will make a strong contribution to start-ups in the US economy, given that its skilled immigration policies tend to suppress entrepreneurship as an early career choice of immigrants (Agarwal, Ganco, and Raffiee 2021). However, immigrants are more likely than natives to start firms of all sizes, as Azoulay et al. (2022) show by drawing upon a range of data from administrative data on US firms to the Fortune 500 (see also Fairlie and Lofstrum 2015; Kerr and Kerr 2020). In addition, start-ups who can hire H-1B workers are more likely to have a successful exit via an initial public offering in the stock market or acquisition, and are more likely to receive additional venture capital funding (Dimmock, Huang, and Weisbenner 2022; Chen, Hshieh, and Zhang 2021).4 Some of that additional venture capital funding comes from abroad; hiring skilled immigrant workers improves start-ups’ access to international venture capital funding because of their home-country professional networks and familiarity with the home country culture (Li 2020).

Even utilizing the existing pipeline of skilled workers being produced by U.S. universities is dependent on high-skilled immigration, as roughly two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in fields relevant to chipmaking are foreign-born. The status quo for these students already hampers U.S. competitiveness as major flaws in the current immigration system are allowing these students to be successfully recruited by other countries with better functioning high-skilled immigration systems. For example, over 45,000 foreign-born graduates of U.S. colleges have been recruited to Canada’s high-skilled immigration programs in recent years.[4] This exodus is no surprise given that the insufficient supply of employment-based green cards that often leaves skilled workers stuck on temporary visas for a decade or more.

Semiconductor production is incredibly complex, and at all stages requires a workforce that is not just highly skilled but also possesses hands-on experience. Consequently, international engineers at TSMC, Samsung, and other manufacturers represent a “critical competitive advantage in the chipmaking industry,”[1] and requiring the U.S. industry to grow solely using the domestic workforce would deprive manufacturers of critically important workers who possess the on-the-ground knowledge necessary for success immediately.

Historically, attracting thousands of high-skilled and experienced workers has proven central for successful industrial policy around the globe. During its infancy, Taiwan’s now-dominant semiconductor industry drew from the diaspora of thousands of Taiwanese living in the U.S. who possessed hands-on experience in the U.S. industry, which at the time was the global hub for advanced chip manufacturing. At the company’s beginning, the majority of TSMC’s executive team had experience in the U.S. working for Motorola, Intel, or Texas Instruments.[2] When China sought to replicate Taiwan’s successful policy push, they realized foreign talent was central and hired thousands of experienced engineers from Taiwan.[3] Again and again, countries tailoring industrial policy to boost semiconductor manufacturing have recognized the centrality of experienced, high-skilled immigrants to get off the ground.