Exchange Visa Skills List Updated with Eye on Foreign Talent (1)

The State Department on Friday overhauled the list of occupational fields triggering a home-residency requirement for exchange visitor visa holders, removing the mandate entirely for several countries including China.

Dropping China and other several other nations from the skills list allows international scholars and researchers from those countries to seek another visa and continue work in the US without returning to their home country first.

The update—the first since 2009—didn’t change any fields for the countries that appear on the Skills List. The list will take effect when it’s published in the Federal Register Dec. 9. In addition to China, thirty-four countries were removed from the list, including India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

More than a quarter million individuals come to the US through exchange visitor programs on J-1 visas each year. Many are required to fulfill a two-year home residency requirement after completion of their program, including about 40,000 workers in fields designated as essential to the development of their home countries on the Skills List, according to the Institute for Progress.

It’s unclear exactly how many workers are affected by the mandate, because the State Department doesn’t publish data on visa holders subject to the home-residency requirement. Research and technology advocates say the requirement harms the ability of the US to retain foreign talent that benefited from training here.

Data-driven Update

The Skills List revision accounts for economic development, country size, and overall outbound migration rate in assessing designated countries, the State Department said in the notice. It plans to review the list every three years for new updates.

The revision assumes countries with low gross domestic product and small countries with slightly larger economies benefit from appearing on the Skills List. Significant outbound migration was also a factor in designating some countries for the list.

“These criteria are meant to ensure countries with low levels of development as well as those countries with higher levels of development that have other extenuating circumstances that stymie the development of a skilled workforce will remain on the Skills List to support the development of that country,” according to the Federal Register notice.

China has surpassed the US in producing graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, so it made little sense to force people who train here to return home, said Divyansh, a vice president at consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies who focuses on emerging technologies and national security. The country has used the Skills List as a “loop hole” to gain knowledge and pursue transfer of intellectual property, he said.

“This provides an opportunity to people who are seeking nothing more than their freedom and want to contribute to the United States,” Kaushik said.

Outdated Restrictions

Since the Skills List was first issued in the 1970s, the fields designated for the home residency rule have been primarily by requests from foreign governments. Critics say that’s contributed to setting visa requirements that are arbitrary and opaque.

The share of workers covered by the list actually rises with a country’s income level, according to the Institute for Progress. And countries with similar levels of development can have vastly different representation of fields on that list, according to a report the group released earlier this year. Mali imposes the home return requirement on almost all fields, for example, while Gambia doesn’t impose it on any.

The original rationale behind the list—that immigration creates a “brain drain” effect in their countries of origin—has also been complicated by new evidence showing that skilled immigration can increase development in home countries, according to advocates for updating the criteria for the Skills List. The possibility of immigrating spurs workers’ investment in education and, once in the US, they help to spark new technologies back home. Immigrants’ remmitances to their countries have also eclipsed foreign aid in many countries.

For the first time in a long while, we’re not going to just be asking other countries to in good faith tell us which high-skilled people to send back to them,” said Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at Institute for Progress. “We’ve been outsourcing those decisions to countries like China. It’s nice to see that decision making actually come back to Washington and be done in an objective and transparent manner.”

The State Department’s revisions were part of a number of regulatory steps directed by the White House’s executive order last year on promotion of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Science policy organizations even earlier had begun to put a spotlight on hurdles in the US immigration system to keeping international talent.

Foreign scholars make up most of the participants in STEM postdoctoral programs, including two-thirds of those in engineering and computer and information science. The J-1 visa is the most frequently used visa for international postdocs.