The US government wants to change some of the existing H-1B provisions in order to play a better role in attracting high skilled workers from foreign countries. On Thursday Chris Liddell who is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination told the Washington citizens “The president’s overall instinct — and he said this publicly a number of times — he wants to find ways to make sure that people who graduate in a highly skilled area like technology stay in the country. He finds that a very positive part of the overall immigration”
Afterwards when Chris Liddell was asked about the president’s thoughts on H-1B immigration during the live discussion on new technology at Washington Post, Chris Liddell replied, “He has talked about merit immigration, clearly that (H-1B) fits in merit immigration.”
Meanwhile, he admitted that judicially, this concern might get caught up in a border discourse. A former chief financial officer of Microsoft and General Motors, Chris Liddell is tasked to oversee and coordinate US President Donald Trump’s policy process.
The White House official said, “To the extent that we can form a regulatory point of view rather than a legislative point of view, because the H-1B system to a large extent is governed by legislation — but to the extent that we can modify the regulatory point of view to promote it to be more highly skilled as opposed to outsourcing roles, there’s 1, 20,000 H-1Bs. So it’s quite a big pool”
Chris Liddell said “Traditionally, unfortunately they have gone to lower-skilled outsourcing types of jobs”. He also said that we would love to find various ways to change that as more people are coming out in the tech sector with PHDs.
Chris Liddell said, “President is 100 per cent aligned with that. We’ll try and do it as much as we can by regulatory; if it can be done legislatively as well in some way that would as part of a merit-based system that would be fantastic”.
The White House official said that there is more need to carry on new reforms in H-1B to maintain more graduates in this country which are talented. For immigration debate, this is most important constructive part, which doesn’t get more focus unfortunately.
Liddell said about President Trump views on this topic by saying that trump has recently spoken about the new changes as an important part of the immigration platform and the tech industries and the Silicon Valley must welcome such reforms.
“Relatively, as a country, a very small proportion of the people who come in as legal immigrants do it on a merit-based system relative to any other country I know,” Liddell said.
He also said “So promoting the concept of merit-based immigration, which clearly would be at least partially orientated towards the tech sector, I would think that there should be a high degree of alignment on.”
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