Ban on New Foreign Workers Left U.S. Jobs Unfilled, Even in Covid Downturn

wsj.com

4 points·stanrivers··2 comments

>“A deficit of domestic tech workers to fill available American tech jobs is worsened by the lack of access to foreign talent,” said Peter Leroe-Muñoz, general counsel and senior vice president of tech policy for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, an industry lobbying group. He said about 59% of the area’s workforce is foreign-born, including those holding H1B visas.

>Many jobs in such fields as information technology would have been filled by foreign workers holding H1B visas in the past year, Mr. Nowrasteh said, but instead they remained open or were moved overseas.

Interesting to think about how the US is somehow unable to home-grow talent in important fields like this... these tend to be well paying jobs but Americans, for some reason, can't fill them.

Well on a macro scale American often tends to neglect the K-12 education, make college inaccessible due to costs and then think that some government retraining program whose duration is measured in months can turn X skilled labor force into members of Y knowledge/office worker force later in life.

For clarity I kind of want to say we neglect K-12 education funding, but compared to much of the world that's not true in terms of pure spending per head in the school. Perhaps more accurate we don't exactly get bang for our buck in many school systems.

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