07 June 2007

Google encourages U.S. legislation to increase cap on foreign skilled workers

Google's Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, took a clear stand in his testimony at the Hearing on Comprehensive Immigration before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law on 6 June, 2007. He stated:

"We believe that it is in the best interests of the United States to welcome into our workforce talented individuals who happen to have been born elsewhere, rather than send them back to their countries of origin.

"Google's success - like that of technology companies across our nation - absolutely depends on attracting the best and the brightest employees". About eight percent of Google's employees in the United States are foreigners with a H-1B visa.

Referring to the increasing competition from Indian and Chinese IT companies, Bock said, "If U.S. employers are unable to hire those who are graduating from our universities, foreign competitors will."

In addition to his claim for raising the cap on H-1B visas, Bock also appealed to the US congress to increase efforts to issue more employment-based green cards for highly skilled workers.

The H-1B visa regulations allow U.S. employers like Google to employ skilled foreigners who have the equivalent US Bachelor's Degree education. A H-1B visa gets issued for a period of up to 6 years. In 2006 the H-1B visa cap was lowered to 65,000 from a former 116,927 in 2005. Universities and non-profit and government research laboratories are exempted from this limit.

The demand for H1-B employees from American companies, especially within the IT sector, has been very high in the last years; but the program has also been criticized for putting American professionals at a disadvantage by allowing foreign workers who are willing to work for lower wages into specialised positions.

In his testimony, Bock took the criticism against the H1-B visa programme into account:

"This doesn't mean we don't recruit here in the U.S., or that American workers are being left behind. To the contrary, we are creating jobs here in the U.S. every day."

In pointing out the fact that one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin, had fled the Soviet Union in 1979 to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, Bock touched on core principles of the American Dream.

Laszlo Bock himself comes from an immigrant background. A Romanian born native, Laszlo Bock's parents came to the U.S. when they fled communist Romania under dictatorship. Laszlo's mother was present at the hearing.

Other Google immigrant success stories mentioned by Bock during the hearing included Turkish born Orkut Buyukkokten, who developed and programmed Google's social networking service Orkut, and Krishna Bharat, a native of India, who was one of the chief creators of Google News.