Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce

Book excerpt: Kirkegaard explores the increasingly dysfunctional state of present US high-skilled immigration laws and recommends a coherent set of immediate reforms, which should aim to facilitate continuously high and increasingly economically necessary levels of high-skilled immigration to the United States. In recent decades American skill levels have stagnated and struggled to make the global top 10. As baby boomers retire, the United States risks losing these skills altogether. In response, the United States should address high-skilled immigration in its broader foreign economic policies in an attempt to remain a global leader in the face of accelerating global economic integration.