We close the door to educated foreigners at our peril

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- What do Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie have in common? Both were immigrants. How about the companies Intel, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems? All have been incredibly successful and all were founded by immigrants.

Highly educated and entrepreneurial individuals from throughout the world have long come to America's shores and contributed to our economic growth and leadership in innovation and technology. This is America's immigration history. Continued inclusion of such intelligence and commitment to our society, from all backgrounds, can help ensure that America keeps making history.

The issue is simple. We're making it too hard for highly educated, sought-after foreign students, researchers, scientists, teachers, engineers and other professionals to come to the United States to live and work.

What's at stake is also simple: American innovation leadership and competitiveness. Despite the long history of evidence pointing to the contributions of highly educated foreign workers, the United States has put up a no vacancy sign instead of a welcome mat.

Our organization experiences the resulting crisis firsthand. As a university research management consortium, we are charged with two lofty goals -- solving the technical challenges facing the semiconductor industry and developing technical talent for our member companies, the nation's leading chipmakers.

But, nationwide, a majority of advanced degrees in mathematics, science and engineering are earned by foreign students. The universities with which we interact daily are providing world-class educations to many of the brightest minds on earth. Yet, after we educate them, we send them home or to other countries, to compete against U.S. companies.

Here's an example. North Carolina's leading engineering schools -- Duke, North Carolina A&T, N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill -- awarded 271 Ph.Ds in engineering and electrical engineering in 2006. Of those doctorates, 173 went to foreign students. That's 63 percent. In an ideal world, that wouldn't be an issue, because American employers would be able to hire these talented individuals. Reality, however, is far from the ideal.

Today, foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges and universities can extend their student visas for one year following graduation to seek employment. If they are offered a job, the U.S. employer will then apply for a visa for the new employee -- usually an H-1B visa, which is reserved for those with special skills and the equivalent of a B.A. degree.

Because of the arbitrarily low cap on the number of H-1B visas that can be allocated each year, tens of thousands of applications from foreign graduates of U.S. universities are denied. Similarly, untenable backlogs in green card processing are severely hampering the ability of employers to attract top-notch foreign talent.

Clearly the demand for this talent exists. It is a counterproductive policy that prevents these highly educated graduates from being employed in the United States and from helping America stay competitive. Congress must act this year or run the risk of closing the door on the next Einstein or Carnegie; saying "no thanks" to the next Intel, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems. That's something we just can't afford to do.

(Larry Sumney is president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, based in Research Triangle Park.)