Modernizing the US Exchange Visitor Skills List

The United States depends on highly skilled workers from abroad to help drive economic innovation and dynamism, but it also extensively restricts which of these workers can enter and stay in the country. This Policy Brief proposes comprehensive reform of one lesser-known restriction, the Exchange Visitor Skills List. The US government uses the List to determine which types of high-skill workers, from which countries, have to leave the United States and go back to their home countries for two years after their visitor program ends. The original, admirable purpose of the Skills List was to avoid draining developing countries of scientists, physicians, educators, and other workers with specialized knowledge and expertise. But the current List, crafted to conform with foreign government requests over the past 52 years, is outdated and arbitrary. Clemens and Kerr propose a new system to modernize the Skills List by applying criteria based on various factors, including foreign countries' income level, population size, diaspora size, and departure rate--the number of a country's skilled workers in the United States as a share of those at home. Doing this would reduce the number of high-skill visitors forced to leave the United States by roughly three-quarters--affecting particularly those from the most advanced economies. It would make the US government fully responsible for determining the Skills List under a transparent, predictable, and systematic process that could be frequently updated at low cost. It would better serve the US national interest while supporting sustainable development in migrants' home countries.