June 11, 2021: On Thursday, According to a new report released, the U.S. does not have enough high-skilled workers to meet the demand for computer-related jobs, and employers are seeking immigrant talent to help fill that gap.<\/p>

For every unemployed computer or math worker in the country in 2020, there were over seven job postings for computer-related occupations, bipartisan immigration research group New American Economic finds.<\/p>

“More nuanced and responsive policy around employment-based immigration could be one way to help the U.S. quickly and more robustly bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic and future economic disruptions and crises,” the report added.<\/p>

The study comes as record job openings in the U.S. coincide with persistent unemployment, which suggests a mismatch in labor demand and supply. As a result, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign calling for an increase in employment-based immigration to address the shortage of workers.<\/p>

NAE, which billionaire Mike Bloomberg founded, analyzed data from Labor Certification Applications for foreign-born skilled workers, unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the job postings data from the website Burning Glass Technologies.<\/p>

According to NAE’s analysis, employers in the U.S. posted 1.36 million job openings for computer-related roles in 2020. Yet there were only 177,000 unemployed workers in computer and math occupations last year, NAE found, use Labor Department data.<\/p>

“Even something as powerful and traumatic and unprecedented as Covid did not put a dent in the country’s demand and shortage of high-skilled STEM talent,” said Dick Burke, president, and CEO of Envoy Global, an immigration services firm that co-authored the study.<\/p>

Employers continued to seek high-skilled immigrant workers to fill labor shortages during the pandemic. As a result, there were 371,641 foreign labor requests for computer-related jobs filed in 2020, NAE reported.<\/p>

The U.S. disproportionately relies on foreign-born talent in computer-related jobs. For example, immigrants made up 25% of the computing workforce in 2019, according to NAE’s analysis of Census data, compared with 17.4% of the broader labor force, according to the Labor Department.<\/p>

“The evidence in this report is adding more support to the idea that there are still needs from employers in the United States for computer-related workers that are not being addressed by current immigration policy in the United States,” said Andrew Lim, director of quantitative research at NAE.<\/p>

As measured by Labor Certification Applications requests, seven of the ten fastest-growing jobs for immigrant workers were computer-related, NAE reported.<\/p>

“We have not revamped our legal immigration categories, including business immigration, since 1990. As a result, some of those categories are out of alignment with our needs in the United States today,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School who was not involved with the NAE study.<\/p>

\u201cThe pandemic has exacerbated those inconsistencies because people who are desperately needed to restart various businesses have been unable to enter the United States,\u201d Yale-Loehr said.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t