Why the highly coveted visa that changed my life is now reviled in America

[IronLionZion]

(CNN)I did not arrive in America as a refugee or to join family already here. I owe the start to my life in this country to two things: my father's brilliant mind and a very special document.

Daddy was a statistician renowned in his field of probability theory, and in 1975, Florida State University offered him a teaching position. We flew across the globe on Indian passports and gained entry into America with a visa called H-1, reserved for people such as my father who possessed distinctive skills.

We later applied for permanent residency, my father went on to become a professor emeritus at FSU and in 2008, I proudly became a US citizen.

The H-1 visa was designed to attract smart people who were considered the best and the brightest of global talent to fill the gaps in the US workforce. I am a direct beneficiary of that program. Without it, my own trajectory would have been very different.

In 1990, the visa was reinvented as H-1B, and it boomed alongside the rise of Silicon Valley. Most H-1Bs are awarded to technology workers, though other fields such as science and medicine also benefit. And these days, almost 70% of the visas are awarded to Indian nationals.

Without the H-1B program, argue its supporters, innovation is sure to suffer and America stands to lose its competitive edge. Look at any number of start-ups, and you're sure to find talented folks who reached America on an H-1B. Among that elite group is Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/04/us/understanding-the-h-1b-visa/index.html

What's the solution? What's the best way to reform it? These Trumped up times offer the opportunity for something to get through congress and be signed into law.

[Renew Deal]

1. H1-B has been taken advantage of mostly by India to replace qualified American workers with

Equally or less qualified non-American workers. It's a program that has been abused to drive down wages and drive Americans out of tech. The program makes some sense. We might need statistics and doctors. But it isn't only the lives of non-Americans that have changed.

[Lee-Lee]

2. A return to the days when it was truly to bring in talent not available here

Instead of what it has become, in many cases, a way to just import cheaper talent to replace existing American workers.

When corporations starting abusing it like that is when it all changed.

Of course part of that also involves fixing the conditions that cause shortages. We import so many doctors because tha AMA has been very, very successful at artificially limiting the number of doctors trained every year in the USA and fighting attempts to allow wider responsibilities to nurse practitioners and other health care workers to create artificial shortages in order to keep the wages of its members higher.