With immigration reform taking the forefront again in the nation, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says that keeping high tech jobs in the United States should be a major reason why immigration reform should be passed.
Speaking before educators at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Wednesday in Washington D.C., Rubio said that reforming immigration was necessary to keep well-paying tech companies from outsourcing tens of thousands of jobs oversees and keeping needed revenue out of American pockets.
"In some instances, this is no joke, we are graduating kids with these degrees and these skill sets. We are then forcing them to leave the country and the jobs are following them over there," he said. "This is crazy."
The sentiments expressed by Rubio have been echoed by tech experts and lobbyists in the U.S. who have stated that the current immigration system has been making it difficult for them to find and hire highly-skilled immigrants to work for them within the U.S.
Added with the lack of qualified people available in the states for those jobs, the result is immigrants often taking their skill sets abroad to other countries, which weakens the American technology sector.
Rubio suggested that one way to solve the lack of skilled labor among American workers is education reforms that include granting federal student aid to online courses and other non-traditional educational institutions.
"It speaks even more to the need to produce those workers" in the U.S, Rubio said. "That skills gap is a real threat to our future."
Congress has tried to move on passing legislation that allows qualified and highly-skilled immigrants to gain citizenship, but has ended up stumbling on that agenda due to partisan differences on immigration. In November, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, known as the STEM Jobs act, that would have granted tens of thousands of visas to immigrants who complete degrees at U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, and math.
However, the Senate killed the bill on the grounds that the program would have eliminated a visa lottery that offered visas to immigrants from countries with low immigration rates.
Both the Chamber and tech lobbyists have called for immigration reform, tech advocates calling for more STEM visas to be issued while the Chamber has given its support for legalizing undocumented immigrants and granting more visas to highly-skilled workers as a part of new immigration policy.
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