Communications of the ACM
A Google Whiz Searches For His Place on Earth
Sanjay Mavinkurve, from India, is an engineer at Google. Because of difficulty securing a work visa for his wife, they are living in Canada.
Eros Hoagland for The New York Times
Visa and immigration rules are creating conflicts with immigrants who are having a sizable impact on the U.S. technology industry. One such immigrant is Sanjay G. Mavinkurve, a Google engineer who helped establish the platform for Facebook while a student at Harvard. He now resides in Canada because his wife could not get a visa to work in the U.S.
Immigration scholar Vivek Wadhwa says the founders of many Silicon Valley companies and technology giants came from overseas. Half the engineers in Silicon Valley were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Technology executives argue that restrictive immigration measures will discourage talented foreigners and entrepreneurs from emigrating, and will greatly contribute to the U.S.'s waning economic power. The United States currently allows no more than 65,000 temporary H-1B work visas for skilled workers, and there has been a widening chasm between the number of H-1Bs sought and those granted since 2004. "The thing distinctive about this [immigrant] generation, and I think unprecedented, is that they are coming with the highest level of skills in the leading industries," says AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California, Berkeley.
Foreigners also can drive innovation by expanding understanding of overseas consumers. Working for companies based in the United States but living elsewhere, as Mavinkurve does, can put a strain on foreign workers' productivity and enthusiasm.
From The New York Times
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