US tumbles in ranking of world's economies

A few weeks ago I posted this on how the U.S. is falling back in attracting and retaining foreign talent. The World Economic Forum has now come up with a report on global competitiveness of the worlds greatest economies. The U.S. which used to be number one for a long time? is now toppled to sixth place. Switzerland is at the top most spot. Boston Globe reports some of the reasons for the U.S. performance:

The high budget and trade deficits, disappointing response to Hurricane Katrina, government corruption, and a decreasing talent pool for employment due to immigration restrictions were factors cited by the forum, which moved the United States to sixth in its global competitiveness index from the top spot a year ago.

Interesting to see how the biggest emerging economies fared in this list:

Emerging economies such as China's and India's fared modestly. India came in at 43d, carried by its innovation and the sophistication of operations. China dropped six places from last year, to 54th

Competitiveness Can't Compete With Politics

President Bush unveiled the so-called American Competitiveness Initiative during his State of the Union address in January. Since then, though, the ambitious plan with bipartisan support has been stalled by election-year politics.

After pressing since 2004 for legislation to help the United States maintain its technological dominance, the tech industry thought everything was aligned for action this year. Tech executives thought the whole package would be wrapped up in months, not years, and warned that the United States risked falling behind in the global economy unless Congress acted quickly.

"These CEOs aren't Washington guys, and in their minds, when everybody agrees that something's necessary … they just can't see why action is so difficult," said Bruce Mehlman, executive director of the Technology CEO Council, a public policy association of nine top high-tech chief executives.

"We're sorry that some of the important provisions got tied up in much more controversial issues," said White House science advisor John H. Marburger III. "We can't just give up after a year. The stakes are sufficiently high to view this as a multiyear campaign."

The experience has provided another lesson in Silicon Valley's political education: how the crosscurrents of a high-stakes election can derail even broadly popular legislation.

News story: Competitiveness Can't Compete With Politics

October 2006 Visa Bulletin

Every month around the 15th day, the U.S. Dept. of State, releases the visa bulletin which lists who can avail of a visa number next month to adjust status to permanent residency. This bulletin breaks down the numbers based on the category and also seperates out over-subscribed countries from the rest of the world. When you apply for permanent residency you get a case number and a priority date. If your priority date is earlier than the date listed in the visa bulletin for your application category, USCIS will proceed with your case and in most cases you will get your permanent resident card in a few months. Here are the cut-off dates for employment-based permanent residency categories from the October 2006 visa bulletin:

For persons born in India:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	15 Jun 2002	Was previously unavailable
EB3	22 Apr 2001	Moved ahead by 7 days

For persons born in China:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	01 Apr 2005	Moved ahead by 1 month
EB3	01 May 2002	Moved ahead by 2 months

For persons born in Phillipines:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	01 May 2002	Moved ahead by 2 months

For persons born in Mexico:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	01 May 2001	Moved ahead by 9 days

For rest of the world:

Category	Cut-off Date	Movement from previous month
EB1	Current	No change
EB2	Current	No change
EB3	01 May 2002	Moved ahead by 2 months

Most IT related applicants would fall under EB3. That's backlogged by 5 years now for applicants born in India.

Congress ends session without fixing immigration

With the Congress session now drawing to a close and the mid-term elections in November, its really hard now for any bills favoring legal immigration to pass this year. As a last minute PR effort, some House republicans brought a new bill to build a 700 mile fence along the U.S. Mexico border. These provisions already existed in the CIR bill but House republicans didn't want to tackle the immigration implications of building a fence and stalled the bill from passing for the last 2 months.

ImmigrationVoice has started a new fund-raiser campaign to prepare for the next session and has a target of $60,000 within the next three months. I only hope that this time they choose a bill which has chances of passing both houses without much controversy to get their legal immigration provisions through. Some good candidates include the SKIL bill which is mostly ready to be introduced in Congress but the sponsors are looking for an opportune moment. Unfortunatley for the thousands of legal immigrants stuck in the quagmire called retrogression; waiting for another year because of pure political reasons is something that they didn't expect from a country that likes to call itself the greatest nation on the planet.

Global talent: U.S. falls back as other countries take lead

Many industrialized countries have in the past 5 years introduced laws that attract highly skilled foreigners to immigrate to their countries while the U.S. is still squeaking by with decades old laws with quotas that were set in an economy that was very different from what we have today. Among the countries that have much favorable immigration policies for the highly skilled over the U.S. are Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, New Zealand.

Many of these countries didn't have any immigration policies for the high skilled until recently and have woken up to the global high skill shortage. They have worked with their educational institutions, industries and come up with immigration policies that will give them the technical leadership that all nations strive to achieve. Many with much lower population than the U.S. have no numerical limits on immigration and attract the high skilled with incentives such as the ability for spouses to take up employment.

Even countries that traditionally were emigrant countries have started policies to stop the bleeding of talent. China offers incentives for its nationals settled abroad to return back. India's economic boom of the last few years has brought many of its nationals working abroad back. Historically, Ireland has been a country of emigration. However, during its economic boom of the mid-1990’s, known as the “Celtic Tiger,” Ireland began to experience a shortage of skilled workers that was felt by many other industrialized countries. From 1999 to 2003, the number of work visas issued rose from 6,250 to 47,000.

While many of these countries traditionally looked up to the U.S. to emulate its immigration policies, they have now learnt enough and have taken the lead with much better policies to attract the global talent while the U.S. is taking a reactionary approach for short term goals and clubbing high skilled immigration in the same bill that deals with illegal immigration. Talk about being clueless!