Executives in the clean energy and semiconductor industries have called for an urgent easing of immigration rules in the United States, saying the Biden administration’s strategy to reindustrialize the economy requires a rapid influx of foreign labor.
The U.S. has announced more than 80 new projects since Congress passed hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies last year as part of President Joe Biden’s plan to reshoring manufacturing jobs lost to Asia in recent years.
But the investment boom has coincided with a historic tightening of the labor market, leading developers to call for reforms to allow more workers into the United States and retain foreign students.
“We have to fix our high-skilled immigration system,” said Patrick Wilson, vice president of government relations at Taiwan-based semiconductor company MediaTek. “Sending the best foreign-born, American-educated talent to work elsewhere is ludicrous.”
In a heated debate on immigration, calls for more foreign labor came after pandemic-era restrictions expired, with Republican lawmakers blaming the Biden administration for a “surge” in immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The language has to be separated between the political, hot-button issues that (Congress) doesn’t want to address at the border and the larger, very different issues of bringing in high-quality businessmen,” said Bob Clark, of the construction firm Clayco, which is building many of the U.S. factories, including Entek’s $1.5 billion battery plant in Indiana.
Clark said the immigration system forced him to “pick winners” among his cohort of foreign-born interns. Companies chose locations in Canada and Mexico over the U.S. because of those countries’ more friendly immigration laws and larger labor pools, he added.
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Both the Lower Inflation Act and the Chips and Science Act, passed last August, included billions of dollars in subsidies to stimulate domestic clean technology and semiconductor manufacturing and create thousands of jobs.
But Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the U.S. will face a construction shortage of at least 500,000 workers this year because of the construction boom. McKinsey estimates that the US will face a shortage of 300,000 engineers and 90,000 technicians by the end of this decade.
Developers say the labor shortage will slow the rollout of government schemes and make them more expensive.
“These plans are not going to roll out as quickly as the government would like,” said Jeanne Salo, vice president of government relations at Schneider Electric, a France-based energy management group that operates several plants in the United States. “Things will move more slowly because they don’t have the workforce.”
Tight immigration quotas and lengthy waiting periods mean talent is being lost to foreign competitors as analysts call for the “repurposing” of the U.S. workforce into science and engineering fields needed for advanced manufacturing projects.
The U.S. received a record 781,000 H-1B visa lotteries this year, according to the latest data from USCIS, which provides only 85,000 places for college-educated foreign workers to work in the U.S. each year. The country cap on permanent resident cards has also contributed to the backlog in entry.
While the U.S. is the top destination for science, technology, engineering and math degrees, a large proportion of these students are foreign-born. According to the National Science Council, more than half of American workers with engineering doctorates in the United States were born abroad.
“While we’ve partnered with academic institutions across the country to greatly improve opportunities for American students at home, there is still a need to attract and retain more talent,” said David Shahurian, director of workforce policy at Intel. The U.S. semiconductor company said it has invested $280 million over the past five years in developing domestic talent.
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A group of semiconductor companies, including ASML, Intel, Samsung and Texas Instruments, wrote to Congress last year calling for reforms, including exempting senior STEM graduates from permanent residence quotas.
“One arm of the government says, ‘Hey, we’re open for business, come here, we’re rolling out the red carpet for you.’ The other arm is like, ‘Sorry. Our hands are tied,'” Watson Immigration Law’s Immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson said. “We’re really shooting ourselves in the foot.”
As a workaround, the company sends foreign workers to the United States without visas for up to 90 days before leaving and re-entering the country, an executive at a South Korean battery maker said. The fix threatened the project’s timeline and disrupted production, the person said.
“If people want to come to our country and work hard, especially in manufacturing, we should welcome them with open arms,” said Raffi Garabedian, chief executive of Electric Hydrogen, a Massachusetts-based electrolyser maker.
“From the Chamber of Commerce to the semiconductor companies to the bipartisan group of governors, everyone agrees: Congress needs to fix our long-broken immigration laws,” a White House official said, adding that the economic case for reform was “clear.”
“It’s long overdue for Republicans in Congress to agree to stop blocking the president’s comprehensive immigration reform proposal.”
Soon after taking office, Biden introduced a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and improve the employee-based immigration system. A group of House Democrats reintroduced the bill last week after pandemic-era border restrictions ended.
In recent weeks, Republicans in states seeking investment have called for more skilled workers to be allowed into the United States.
“We have to know who is coming into our country, and we have to have a strong border,” said Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the top state for wind power. “At the same time, we must have immigration reform.”
“Immigration reform is very, very important to our future economic growth,” said Commerce Secretary Brad Chambers of Indiana, another Republican-controlled state in the midst of a project-building boom. “I just encourage the federal leadership to roll up their sleeves and move fast.”