The Visa Shortage: Big Problem, Easy Fix

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On Oct. 5, Wim Elfrink, chief globalization officer for Cisco, paid a visit to Duke. He talked about the opportunities his company was seeing in international markets and innovative new technologies being developed for them. Elfrink said he expects to hire 7,000 engineers over the next five years and to have 20% of Cisco's top talent located in India. He encouraged Duke students to apply for jobs in Bangalore.

What Undergrads Say

Will our current crop of foreign-born graduates end up in India or China? I asked my students about their plans.

Baris Guzel, 23, says he has a job offer in Germany and knows of opportunities back home in Turkey. But he wants to stay in the U.S. and join a financial-services or consulting firm. What deters him are ads like those posted by Accenture (ACN) on Duke's recruiting site that read: "Applicants for employment in the U.S. must possess work authorization which does not require sponsorship by the employer for a visa." How can he get a visa if employers won't sponsor him, Guzel asks.

Gauravjit Singh, 24, and his team won a $100,000 prize last September from Duke's CURE business plan competition (BusinessWeek, 10/11/05). He then co-founded a medical-device company to equip clinicians in the developing world with an affordable and effective technology in the fight against cervical cancer. They outsourced the technology development to a Cary (N.C.) design firm. Given how hard it is to get a visa, Gauravjit sees no choice but to return home and run his venture from Bangalore.

Jaineel Aga, 23, says he may have made the wrong decision about studying in the U.S. instead of Europe. The reason he picked the U.S. was because he believed it was more open and welcoming to international students. He wants to become a management consultant and is keen to stay in the U.S. He considers it a travesty that his career may ultimately be decided by a visa lottery.

Tanya Srivastava, 24, says she never planned to stay permanently in the U.S. but did want to work for a few years to get some global experience and pay off the loans she took to complete her U.S. education. But she believes she can easily get a job back home in India if things don't work out here.

All these students said they would discourage their friends from coming to the U.S.

Unlike many of the problems facing the U.S., this one isn't hard to fix. All we need to do is increase the number of visas that are available for international students who get job offers from U.S. companies. An even better solution is to offer these students permanent-resident visas rather than H-1Bs. In the new global landscape, we need the world's best talent on our side.

Vivek Wadhwa, a former tech entrepreneur, is the Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University. He writes a column on policy issues affecting entrepreneurs every month.