Silicon Valley: Further cut in the flow of skilled foreign professionals to America will hurt the nation's competitiveness and its leadership in the world, according to a study by the American Immigration Law Foundation.

"Such actions would slow US labour-force growth, inhibit innovation inside the United States, reduce job growth, and encourage increased efforts to outsource and place overseas high technology jobs and centres for research and development," said the recently released study.

Titled "the Global Battle for Talent and People", the study was conducted by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Centre. It said immigrant professionals contribute significantly to job creation in the country "with Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs alone heading 29 per cent of Silicon Valley's technology businesses."

Collectively these companies accounted for $19.5 billion in sales and 72,839 jobs in 2000, according to the University of California at Berkeley.

Referring to the current concerns about the US economy, the report said these should not distract from an understanding that the country's long-term economic success requires it to attract skilled professionals and workers of all skill levels to fuel the growth of the US labour force.

Contrary to increasing perception that foreign-born professionals are responsible for current layoffs in the high technology sector, the report found that the primary reason for this was the large drop in spending on computers and related hardware and slower growth in spending on software.

Companies like Sun Microsystems were started by foreign graduate students and later expanded their workforces considerably based on innovations made by other foreign nationals.

"It may strike some as ironic that complaints about immigrants or professionals on H-1B visas "taking" away jobs are often directed at companies that would not even exist (or would not have expanded) if not for America's openness to immigrants and foreign-born scientists and engineers."

The study concluded that despite recent problems in the high technology sector, the future appeared to be more positive, with the Bureau of Labour Statistics projecting 47 per cent growth in science and engineering jobs overall and an 82 per cent increase in computer-related jobs between 2000 and 2010. Computer software engineers are projected to increase by 90 to 100 per cent.

According to Stuart Anderson, author of the report and former Executive Associate Commissioner for Policy and Planning and Counsellor to the Commissioner at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the "main point of the paper is that America's strength lies in its openness, and the nation's long-term economic success requires the ability to attract skilled professionals from across the globe, which helps increase American competitiveness."

PTI