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Thousands of H-1B visa holders have been on the edge ever since Donald Trump’s re-election as the US President. Despite the president’s support for the H-1B visa programme, stringent visa regulations await those seeking entry into the US in line with Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship dated January 20.
Amid these events that led to widespread debate on the significance of the H-1B visa programme, industrialist Harsh Goenka Tuesday shared an old video of celebrated American born physicist Michio Kaku schooling people on why the H-1B is America’s secret weapon.
“America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H-1B. Without the H-1B, the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google or Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley without the H-1B. Do you know what the H-1B is? It’s the genius visa,” he can be heard saying in the video.
Kaku, a vocal advocate of the immigrant policies, goes on to say that nearly 50 per cent of all PhD candidates in the US are foreign-born. “You realise that in the US, 50 per cent of all PhD candidates are foreign-born. At my system, one of the biggest in the US, 100 per cent of the PhD candidates are foreign-born. The US is the magnet sucking up all the brains of the world. But now the brains are going back… to China, India. There’s a Silicon Valley in India, China now… Where did it come from? It came from the US! So don’t tell me science is in the engine of prosperity. You remove the H-1B visa and you collapse the economy,” Kaku warns.
Citing the Wall Street Journal, the scientist adds, “Look, there are no Americans who can take these jobs. These are at the highest level of high technology. They (H-1B visa holders) don’t take jobs from Americans. They create entire industries,” he says.
Who’s Kaku?
Michio Kaku is an American physicist, science communicator, futurologist, and writer of popular-science. Born in San Jose, California, he is the co-founder of String Field Theory. His parents were both second-generation Japanese-Americans.
He holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).
