Compete America

Compete America

Compete America, The Alliance for a Competitive Workforce, is a coalition representing corporations, universities, research institutions and trade associations that advocates for reform of U.S. immigration policy for highly educated foreign professionals.

Compete America supports the idea that scientists, researchers, innovators and engineers will always be in demand and will always drive economic growth and job creation, whether American or foreign-born. Because of this, they argue that arbitrarily low visa quotas and massive backlogs in the system plague the employment- based visa process.

Compete America’s legislative goals are:

• The end of arbitrary obstacles to employment and permanent residency for foreign-born master’s and Ph.D. graduates from U.S. universities
• A streamlined green card process
• A market-based H-1B visa cap

On May 23, 2007, Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times, “Compete America…is pleading with Congress to boost…the number of employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because we’re not training enough engineers, but they will, over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that — and where innovation happens matters. It’s still where the best jobs will be located.”