WASHINGTON _ Silicon Valley badly needs high-skilled tech workers and plenty of them live in other countries _ and America's tech leaders are concerned that the Trump administration doesn't understand their needs.
Peter Leroe-Munoz, vice president of technology and innovation policy for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a trade association, said tech officials have long wanted more H-1B visas.
But when asked Monday if President Donald Trump was open to expanding the H-1B program, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said only, "We've talked a lot about visa reform in the past, and I think the president wants to make sure that he listens to the various people who have interest in this subject."
Leaders of some of the biggest tech companies including Amazon.com, Apple and Microsoft convened in Washington Monday primarily to discuss how to bring Silicon Valley innovation to the federal government. Participants also included college presidents and administration officials.
They held working sessions on several matters, including citizen services, cloud computing, analytics, cybersecurity, purchasing and contract reform, talent recruitment and retraining, and government and private sector partnerships.
Addressing the session with tech leaders, Trump praised them for helping the federal government's effort to revamp "painfully outdated technology."
"Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution," Trump said. "We're going to change that with the help of great American businesses like the people assembled." He did not mention visas.
The H-1B program, created by the Immigration Act of 1990, was intended to allow U.S. companies to hire foreign workers with special skills whom the firms could not find at home. It put protections in place to ensure that companies did not use the law to replace American workers with cheaper labor.
Still, there was controversy. A loophole in the law allowed Disney, Southern California Edison and the University of California, San Francisco, to lay off IT workers and replace some of them with H-1B visa holders.
In April, Trump announced his "Buy American, Hire American" executive order, which called for a review of the H-1B visa program.
"Right now, H-1B visas are awarded in a totally random lottery _ and that's wrong. Instead, they should be given to the most-skilled and highest-paid applicants, and they should never, ever be used to replace Americans," Trump said at a speech in Kenosha, Wis., announcing the order.
Leroe-Munoz indicated Americans aren't being replaced, but that there just aren't enough Americans to meet the demands of the tech industry. He said there is a need for 125,000 computer science students every year, but the U.S. graduates only 50,000, half of whom are foreign-born.
H-1B workers are also highly paid. According to 2015 data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, Google paid its H-1B workers an average salary of about $130,000, Apple between $123,600 and $154,200 and Facebook $141,000. Other companies, though, pay less.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., one of Silicon Valley's representatives in Congress, said Trump's statements suggested a "sledgehammer approach" to immigration reform and that tech leaders are eager to set the record straight.
"They want to make sure the facts get out," Khanna said.
Khanna acknowledged that there was some abuse in the system, but noted that the H-1B visa program was also responsible for executives such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
He said tech leaders should impress upon Trump the importance of immigration to his plans for economic growth. Trump's budget assumes the economy will grow by 3 percent.
"There's no way we can have 3 percent (economic) growth without immigration, it's just impossible," Khanna said.
Both Democrats and Republicans are trying to address the issue with legislation. In the House, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. introduced a bill to change the H-1B system, giving priority to companies willing to pay foreign employees higher wages.
In the Senate, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is planning to reintroduce his Immigration Innovation Act to address H-1B visas. Hatch proposed capping the number of H-1Bs a single employer can seek, and requiring additional proof that employers tried to hire Americans first.
"Unfortunately, a handful of bad actors has created a great deal of unease about H-1B visas by misusing the system to offshore jobs to foreign workers," Hatch said in a Senate speech in February.
